There’s nothing like a bit of mystery to get people going and this weekend Google set the web awash with speculation.
Saturday September 5th seemed like any other day until we opened our laptops or sat our desktops and found that the Google doodle for the day featured an alien spaceship apparently abducting an ‘O’ from Google. What on earth was that all about?
Google usually uses the doodles to mark anniversaries, holidays, famous thinkers, scientists or other significant events, but on Saturday, there appeared to be nothing noteworthy that we could think of.
When we clicked on the logo to see if that shed any light on it we were taken to a search for the term ‘unexplained phenomena’.
The speculation increased when during the morning the numeric code 1.12.12 25.15.21.18 15 1.18.5 2.5.12.15.14.7 20.15 21.19 appeared on Google’s twitter stream.
Now some have translated this code to mean ‘all your O are belong to us’ which they believed to be reminiscent of a famous internet meme from the year 2000. The mystery deepened with Google’s statement on the matter late on Saturday night.
“We consider the second ‘o’ critical to user recognition of our brand and pronunciation of our name. We are actively looking into the mysterious tweet that has appeared on the Google twitter stream and the disappearance of the “o” on the Google homepage. We hope to have an update in the coming weeks.”
Has anyone solved the mystery yet? Those that think they might have include Shane Richmond from the Telegraph newspaper who put forward the theory that it was to commemorate Zero Wing, a Japanese video game which said ‘all your base are belong to us’.
He cited information on Wikipedia which gave the release date of Zero Wing as September 5th 1989, which would have made it twenty years old on Saturday.
Smart thinking, but other bloggers refute this as a little research revealed the entry to Wikipedia was made on the 6th September, a day after Google’s Doodle appeared.
Other theories put forward include; reference to UFO Festival in Exeter, Reference to Voyager 1, and the Japanese Prime Minister’s Wife’s visit to Venus. Now that was funny. However, these are also being rejected by others. Some even think that the earth may have been contacted by aliens.
‘Unexplained phenomena’ just happens to be one of the most popular search terms so there are those who are asking if the Google Doodle is a reaction to that or whether Google actually wants to encourage traffic to that search term.
Who knows! Can you solve the riddle?
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I think that it is a marketing strategy for the users to think about. I know there are many fictions about alien but this one is just a marketing strategy to be able to think that there are some connection with an alien life out there, who knows than google itself….