Google put up three animated doodles to celebrate Mother’s day. Here’s screenshots of each of them:
Mother’s Day Doodle
Google Doodle – Teacher Appreciation Week
Today’s Google doodle celebrates Teacher Appreciation Week!
Here’s a screenshot of the Google home page with the doodle:
Clicking on the doodle leads to a search for Teacher Appreciation Week:
Here’s a copy of the doodle image:
Google Doodle: Ruth Asawa
Today’s Google doodle celebrates the sculpture artist, Ruth Asawa.
This is how the Google front page looked like:
Here is the doodle by itself:
The doodle linked to a search for Ruth Asawa:
SEO: Images Are Important Too
Search Engine Land posted an insightful article today: Apparently Google is featuring images more often in its search results than in the past: https://searchengineland.com/google-starts-showing-more-images-in-the-web-search-results-315804 .
For example: search Google for a keyword, and if Google decides you might be interested in an image search, it’ll show an image bar within the search page. Now this images bar has always existed, but the Search Engine Land article indicates that this bar is becoming more frequent/being added to more searches. Here’s a demonstration:
cupcake
With this new emphasis on images, it’s important to properly SEO images on your website. Make sure to fill out the ALT attribute on the IMG HTML tag, and have a caption explaining the image. Use a high quality image if available.
Notre Dame Fire
During today’s Notre Dame fire, Google updated the search results for Notre Dame to indicate the emergency. Here is what Google Maps showed (note the little fire icon above the cathedral):
If you Google searched for the fire, or clicked the link from Maps, you’ll see the following screenshot. Note the emergency alert at the top, and the map of the fire’s affected area underneath the news section.
Google Introduces before: And after: Date Searching
Google recently posted the below Twitter thread, introducing the before: and after: search operators. Now instead of using advanced search to limit searches by date, you can use these operators straight in the search box.
For example, if I need to search for Star Wars content before 2018, I can try:
star wars before:2018
Compare that to a regular search for Star Wars content, which includes news released in this year – 2019.
star wars
Google Testing New GoogleBot – Capable Of Rendering More Web Apps
Search Engine Land announces they’ve spotted a new version of GoogleBot in the wild – it’s based on a more recent version of Chrome and can therefore render (and index for search) more advanced web applications:
https://searchengineland.com/google-spotted-testing-version-of-googlebot-that-can-render-more-content-315322 . A Googler even confirms the story through Twitter.
While we know that the GoogleBot is constantly improving, it’s good to see that Google is investing more time into GoogleBot being able to see modern web applications.
Google Doodle: The First Image Of A Black Hole!
Today, the Google doodle celebrates the first image taken of a black hole. Here is the doodle image:
Here’s the Google main page with the doodle:
Clicking on the logo links you to a search for First Image of a Black Hole:
Search Engine Land: Google Search De-Indexing Issue
An article in Search Engine Land comments that Google Search is currently suffering a de-indexing problem: in other words, some web pages are not appearing in Google search. Read the article here:
https://searchengineland.com/googles-de-indexing-issue-still-not-fully-resolved-but-google-is-working-on-it-315070 .
Google Easter Egg: Do A Barrel Roll
In computing, an Easter Egg is a hidden trick that an application or web site can do. There are a lot of famous easter eggs buried in various programs, and Google is no exception.
If you have a reasonably modern web browser, search Google for do a barrel roll. The Google screen itself should rotate through 360 degrees in imitation of a barrel roll. Here are some example screenshots of the rotation:
do a barrel roll
If you want to see the barrel roll recorded on video, try this YouTube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksJ8uy09KkA .
The do a barrel roll phrase was popularized by 4chan, but originated from Star Fox 64, where a major character repeats that phrase to encourage dodging from enemy fire. See Know Your Meme for an explanation or this YouTube video for gameplay footage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIkJvY96i8w .