Google the Barcode and Mahatma Gandhi

Posted • October 7, 2009 • Comments Off

Google Logo Today is a Salute to the 57th Anniversary of the First Barcode Patent

Google marketing has done it again. In their own unique and yet predictable fashion Google has chosen another “doodle” as their logo of the day. Google has chosen to celebrate barcodes by using one as their logo today.

Google’s new logo is a barcode which, as far as we can tell, says “Google.” Today is the 57th anniversary of the first patent on the bar code. Inventors Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver filed the patent on October 1949, and it was granted, No. 2,612,994 (pdf), on October 7, 1952. The original patent was for a system that would encode data in circles (a bulls eye pattern), so that it could be scanned in any direction (see this interesting article for more history).

The barcode on the Google homepage is Code 128 encoded, which is a standard way of encoding ASCII character strings (ie. A-Z, a-z, 0-9, etc.) into a barcode. It would be safe to assume that Google used their own open source barcode project, ZXing, to generate the barcode. The same library is used in Android for barcode recognition.

Washington Post

(Post from Search Engine Optimizician.)
Earlier this month Google used what appeared to be a duo tone drawing of Gandhi in celebration of what would have been the 140th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi.

If you like one of these or any other versions of the Google Logo, if you are using Firefox as your browser, you can resurrect them and have them show up on the Google home page and in your searches. You can find complete instructions on how to use your favorite Google logo on their home page and in the search results in the previous post titled “Greasemonkey Scripts for Google Search and Firefox“.

You can generate your own barcode at this website.

Late,

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