New Google Favicon

Google’s new favicon (the little square icon shown on browser tabs and in favourites folders) has caused quite a stir. Well about as much of a stir as a 16×16 pixel image can. The old Google icon was a nice upper case ‘G’ as seen here:

The new icon has been designed to work well on internet enabled phones as well as normal browsers.

“We recognized there was a need for a Google icon that would better work across multiple applications including web, mobile and client applications. We felt the small ‘g’ had many of the characteristics that best represent our brand: it’s simple, playful, and unique. We will be looking to improve and enhance this icon as we move forward.”

More than 300 different logos were designed before the lowercase ‘g’ was chosen. Some people have pointed out that the favicon looks like the infinity symbol ∞. Perhaps this can be seen as a sign of Google’s attempt to index an ever increasing number of pages. Or pehaps their attempt at world domination!

Those of us who use Firefox can install a Greasemonkey script to restore the old logo here.

Artist Jeff Koons creates Google theme.

The artist Jeff Koons designed today’s google logo as an introduction to Google’s new iGoogle themes. Users are able to choose a theme to decorate their igoogle homepage for free. Other artists participating include Rolf Harris, Ronnie Wood, Philippe Starck and Coldplay.

The themes were designed to allow users to interact with and discover artworks. Rather than paying the artists Google made a donation to charity.

The rest of the iGoogle themes are available from here.

*Update: The image based on a sculpture called ‘Tulips’ which is currently on show in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Here is an image of the sculpture. The Tulips perhaps refer to Queen’s Day in the Netherlands (April 30th).

On stats, search terms and Unicorns

As the more observant amongst you may have guessed, my previous two blog posts were attempts at getting my blog a bit more love from search engines. Both the posts, whilst hopefully interesting, were based on high ranking search terms found via Google Trends. I’ve noticed that a lot of my visits come from search engines although a great deal come directly from WordPress.

The post about ‘Ashley Dupre‘ came up 14th for that search term in google a short while after its publication. This was the highest ranking search term over the weekend and netted me 1870 hits on Saturday alone. This blog gets on an average between 20-100 hits a day although a few of my posts have really taken off. When I logged in to my account on Saturday I was a little confused at the ‘blog stats’ graph, it took a while for me to work out what was going on. I don’t expect to match that number of hits again any time soon.

The next post was aimed at the 93rd most popular search term yesterday ‘number of horns on a unicorn‘. This may have been a little silly however as the Googlehack/easter egg is revealed in the search which kind of negates the usefulness of the blog post. My blog was 11th for this term yesterday (second page) and is 4th at the moment. I got 132 hits to that post yesterday, although most were via reddit.

I don’t actually benefit from increased traffic as I have no ads or services to sell but it’s nice to see that people are actually reading my blog and it’s nice to get comments!
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number of horns on a unicorn

Ever wondered how many horns are on a unicorn? If so you are not alone, the phrase ‘number of horns on a unicorn’ is the 93rd most popular search term in google today. Whist looking on google.com/trends I was shocked to see this question in amongst the names of recently disgraced authority figures and female celebrities who have trouble keeping on their clothes.

It turns out that this is the latest google trick, type the phrase into google and it will give you the answer along with the search results. For a similar trick try typing ‘french military victories’ in and press ‘I’m feeling lucky’.

For those of you still wondering what the answer is, here is a clue: unicorn.

Search ‘number of horns on a unicorn’ on google.

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