Google mark Remembrance Day … eventually

! This post hasn't been updated in over a year. A lot can change in a year including my opinion and the amount of naughty words I use. There's a good chance that there's something in what's written below that someone will find objectionable. That's fine, if I tried to please everybody all of the time then I'd be a Lib Dem (remember them?) and I'm certainly not one of those. The point is, I'm not the kind of person to try and alter history in case I said something in the past that someone can use against me in the future but just remember that the person I was then isn't the person I am now nor the person I'll be in a year's time.

After complaining on Sunday that Google decided to mark Remembrance Sunday with a picture of the Cookie Monster rather than a poppy, it was suggested that we should give Google the benefit of the doubt and see if they use a poppy logo on Remembrance Day itself.

Well, today was Remembrance Day and guess what?  Yep, there was no poppy logo on Google UK this morning.  Nor on the Google USA site, Google Canada, Google Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, France or Belgium where the poppy is used to commemorate fallen soldiers on the 11th of November.  In France and Belgium it’s a public holiday, such is the importance they put on Armistice Day.

Suitably enraged, I decided to take some affirmative action.  I emailed another complaint to Google’s press office, started a “viral tweet” on Twitter and got BBC Radio Shropshire talking about it.  An hour or two later I got an email from a Google PR person saying they had put a poppy under the search box.  I pointed out that the only way to get a poppy logo on the Google UK site was to view it on a mobile phone and click the “Classic” link to get the proper site.  The PR man said he would get it looked into.

At about 11:40am the poppy appeared on the Google UK site and some time afterwards a poppy Google Doodle miraculously put in an appearance in place of the normal Google logo.  People power won the day, it seems, but it shouldn’t have taken this much effort to get Google to remember our fallen soldiers.

3 comments

  1. Ginro (6 comments) says:

    Well done!

    The little poppy under the search box was still appearing every now and again for some of the day.

    It shouldn’t have taken any effort at all really as Google should have done the right thing in the first place.

  2. Stan (222 comments) says:

    Nicely done Mr W, I’m impressed

  3. jameshigham (87 comments) says:

    Took them a while.

Leave a Reply to Ginro Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Time limit is exhausted. Please reload CAPTCHA.