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Does Google Hate America?The search giant rankles the right by declining to commemorate certain holidays.

By Chris Thompson
Posted Friday, June 13, 2008, at 8:12 AM ET
Google logo

It all started with Burning Man. In 1998, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin took time off from coding search algorithms to jump in a car, drive to Nevada, and bake in the desert with circus performers and ecstasy-addled freaks. On a lark, the two men tweaked Google's logo to tip off hipsters that they were out of the office, planting a Burning Man image inside one of Google's letters. "They wanted to communicate with the users, in a fun, lighthearted way, that they were going to be away," says Dennis Hwang, Google's Web-master manager. "Anyone in the know would know where they were."

That kicked off a tradition almost unique in the history of corporate branding. While it's usually gospel truth never to mess with the logo, Page, Brin, and Hwang tweak the Google home page several times a year on a lark, partly to advance their company's distinctiveness, and partly because they just feel like it. They've posted Google "doodles" to commemorate the invention of the laser, the launch of Sputnik, the World Cup, and Piet Mondrian's birthday. The spirit of their doodles, they thought, was pretty clear: Science is cool, art is cool, let's have a little fun.

But in the last few years, as Google has grown to dominate the world of Internet search, some people have detected a more sinister motive behind its choice of days to commemorate. From the National Review to NewsBusters and InstaPundit, some of the country's most prominent conservative opinion journals and news sites have published stories and blog posts denouncing Google for subtly pushing a liberal worldview in its doodles while steadfastly refusing to commemorate patriotic or religious holidays.

Few keep a closer watch on Google than the editors of National Review. For years, they have monitored Google's doodles in search of value judgments about America. When Google ignored Memorial Day in 2006, editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg wrote on NRO's Corner, "It's kind of sad. They change their logo for all sorts of holidays and occasions. Just last week they paid tribute to Arthur Conan Doyle's birthday. But Memorial Day doesn't seem to rate anything at all." In 2007, online editor Kathryn Jean Lopez wrote, "What, no Easter? I wasn't expecting a risen Christ, but at least an Easter bunny?" Last June 6, Lopez sniffed, "So today is the D-Day anniversary. Today is the day RFK died 40 years ago. So Google is celebrating Diego Velazquez's birthday, natch."

Even when Google commemorates Independence Day, Lopez has looked for hints of a clandestine liberal sensibility. Last year, she printed a comment from a reader who claimed that the American eagle on Google's logo was clutching olive branches—but not arrows, the symbol of America's military might: "I think they've gone with a remodeled 'peace is patriotic' bumper sticker. They just couldn't bring themselves to do something 'American' without making some kind of signal about current policy."

All this vitriol leaves Hwang mystified. All they're trying to do, he says, is bring a little humor and quirkiness to their search engine. "This is just something that grew organically, a culture that developed over the years," Hwang says. "It made Google feel like it wasn't just a cold machine, not just an algorithm." It's not an issue of Google—like, say, American Airlines or America Online—trying to mask its national origin from foreign eyes. Still, almost from the beginning, the company caught hell for corrupting Americans with evil doodles. "We got e-mails complaining that we celebrated Earth Day," Hwang laughs. "I was just surprised. We all live on this planet, and celebrating that just seemed like a harmless thing to do."

Perhaps the most extreme condemnations come from the editors of the populist WorldNetDaily.com, who have all but accused Google of advancing the cause of godless communism. "Google consistently ignores patriotic American holidays such as Memorial Day and Veterans Day," WorldNetDaily's editors wrote last October, "but today it acknowledged an accomplishment of the communist Soviet Union, which launched the Sputnik satellite fifty years ago." The news site, which has also complained that Google's search rankings keep its stories in the basement, even ominously reported that the company misspelled its logo when commemorating Valentine's Day last year. "Previous Valentine's Day logos for Google, obtained by WND, have no such possible confusion for spelling," the site noted. Could Google even have it in for love?

"If you're going to choose to commemorate some really quite bizarre occasions, and never, never in their history, never once commemorating Memorial Day, which is a very significant holiday in the United States, I think that says something about who Google is," says WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah. "By the way," he adds, "I like Google's product. I wish there were another company out there that didn't make me sick to my stomach."

Indeed, the blowback against Google just underscores how ubiquitous and powerful the company has become. Google now accounts for more than 60 percent of all online searches conducted in the United States, and whenever any company grows this indispensable, it seems to acquire a quasi-public quality, as if it has an obligation to make official pronouncements on behalf of the American people. In many ways, Google's quirky coders are still struggling to understand the ramifications of the company's global dominance. When Hwang posted a Thanksgiving doodle with fall colors one year, for example, he got endless e-mails from users in the Southern Hemisphere, who pointed out that they were in the middle of spring, in case he hadn't noticed. "We've never been able to keep everybody happy," he says.

Saturday is Flag Day. Will Google do right by America and stand up for Old Glory? Hwang won't say. "The randomness is very important to us," he says. "Otherwise it wouldn't be any fun." You can be sure the right will be watching.

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Chris Thompson writes the Feeling Lucky blog, a feature on The Big Money, Slate's business site launching later this year.
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Remarks from the Fray:

Google's doodles are lighthearted and fun. Memorial Day is a somber occasion to remember those who died in the service of our country. I can't imagine it being given the dignity it deserves by some frivolous doodles.

Maybe I'm wrong. Anyone disagree?

--bearcat98

(To reply, click here.)

This is an open and shut case of a big media power using its presence and influence to advance a liberal, internationalist agenda. Google has no qualms about censoring its searches within China, but does not see fit to honor US Memorial Day. As the great socio-historian Christopher Lasch wrote in The Revolt of the Elites, its a qood question whether the new technology-bred-and-bound intelligentsia even consider themselves Americans. And given that one of the founders is Russan-born, they feel even less devotion to American ideals of freedom and sacrifice.

--dmckinleyp

(To reply, click here.)

What a load of hooey. I lived in Louisiana in the early 1990's and they didn't even celebrate Memorial Day there at all. The kids went to school and we didn;t get a three day weekend. The reason? Memorial Day was first introduced after the Civil War as a remembrance to the Union war dead. People in the South did not want to be included in that, so they substituted Confederate Decoration Day. You can;t get much more All American than that, now can you?

--nlcc2004

(To reply, click here.)

I rather like the doodles, but I certainly don't look for them on specific dates, and if I see the standard Google logo on a day that I consider to be important, I certainly don't take personal offence to that. Even assuming that these are deliberate omissions instead of mere oversights is more than a little bit paranoid. But let's assume for a moment that they're actively denying doodles on certain days as a subtle act of protest against the Bush Administration, OIF, apple pie and goodness in general. Is this company under some obligation to support a specific political faction? I think not.

The simple fact is that it's their company and they can do whatever they want with it within the boundaries of the law. Until we become a Fascist country where everyone is required by government mandate to kowtow patriotically, in unison and upon command, they're pretty much within their rights.

If the founders of Google wish to create a cute Earth Day tribute or draw a little Sputnik cartoon into their company's logo (another giant leap for mankind, IMHO, even if the other side beat us to it), I'm not sure how that's anyone's concern but theirs. If they wish to honor some events while eschewing others… so what? They should be able to do so without incurring anyone's wrath or chipping away at the foundations of Western Civilization.

If your feelings on this matter are so strong, free market capitalism provides an excellent solution. Don't use Google! Otherwise, please be so good as to take your persecution complex elsewhere. Or doesn't the Right believe in the mechanism of free market capitalism anymore?

--quillsinister

(To reply, click here.)

It seems obvious what Google is trying to do. They are trying to lavish attention on days that they feel are important, or people's birthdays who they feel made an important contribution to the culture at large, but which are typically ignored. Memorial Day is not typically ignored. It is a national holiday. There are parades galore. Memorial Day does not need Google's attention for people to know it exists. The same cannot be said of Arthur Conan Doyle's birthday, or the anniversary of the invention of the laser.

So what is Google's motivation for doing this? Google wants to brand itself as hip, cutting edge, youth-driven, and different. As Google evolves from a scrappy but successful startup to a corporate behemoth to a mega-corporation feared even by Microsoft, it becomes more and more of a challenge to maintain that hip, youthful image.

Google's "doodles" help promote that image. Conservative fuddy-duddys who think that American culture was at its apex in 1950 and want to bring America back to that period probably don't give a rip about Piet Mondran or the World Cup. But those born after 1970 might. And those are the people who Google are trying to appeal to. These are the movers and shakers in the tech industry. These are the people who most rely on the internet for every aspect of their lives.

Google is sending these people a message that is, in effect, this: "Google doesn't cater to the old guard. Google caters to YOU. We're one of you. We felt the pain you felt when Kurt Cobain died. So we'd rather commemorate his birthday than D-Day because Kurt Cobain resonates more with your generation than does D-Day, and becacuse D-Day will still get a hell of a lot more attention anyway"

I think its a brilliant strategy. And the more that conservatives and other buffoons who represent the old guard try to wag their collective finger at Google for not paying appropriate reverence to those occasions that the old guard find sacrosanct, the more Google cements its image as an iconoclast. And for a multibillion dollar corporation such as Google, that is no mean feat to pull off

--CaLawyer

(To reply, click here.)

(6/13)

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