For those of you who haven’t already noticed, Google has a completely different logo today to celebrate Charlie Chaplin’s birthday. There is a view from YouTube that Google has produced. You can see the video here. Unfortunately the video is both unlisted and doesn’t show how many views it has got, so it could well become one of YouTube’s most viewed videos, considering that Google gets two billion searches a day, Charlie Chaplin could easily become the most viewed viral video ever.
I most admit that I had to watch the whole video through once to figure out what it was, however something about it interested me: when it showed the search result page for Charlie Chaplin afterwards, Wikipedia came up first suggesting that Charlie Chaplin’s birthday would be tomorrow (16th April 2011), not today (15th April 2011). Not only does Wikipedia think this, but the official commemorative website does as well.
It may well be that ultimately Google leaves the video up as the logo for a few days, however they have only done this once before (with the Pacman game) so I would be very surprised if Google did that. The alternative would be that Google has made an utterly stupid error…
Interestingly, on Google trends you can see that the average number of Charlie Chaplin results are down…
UPDATE: On Google’s blog, they explained that they would be leaving the video up for 36 hours.
