You may or may not be aware of Google’s subtle attempt to promote national holidays , specific anniversaries, and birthdays of historic people, inventions, and events. Every so often when you visit Google.com, they change there logo on the front of their website for an entire day to celebrate something. Some of the most recent logos have been, Invention of the Bar Code (Oct 7, 2009), Mahatma Gandhi's Birthday (Oct 2, 2009), Crop Circles (Sep 15, 2009), Comic-Con Conference (July 23, 2009), and the 40th anniversary of the moon landing (Jul 20, 2009). The first logo change dates back to Aug 30th, 1998 when Larry and Sergey (co-creators of the Google search engine) changed the Google logo to honor the Burning Man festival. The real reason they changed it was because they went to the festival and wanted to inform everyone that if technical problems were to arise, it would be the reason no one was answering the phones in their office. Obviously, this has been a clever of way of getting people to say in the office “Have you seen Google’s logo today?”. It’s a subtle attempt at creating water cooler talk at the office which is one of the ways it has propelled Google to the forefront of search engine branding.

At some point, you might have asked “How does Google make any money if there search engine is free to use?” Here is a fun fact about Google. 99% of Google's revenue is derived from its advertising programs, particularly Google Adwords and Google AdSense. Google Adwords is the program that allows advertisers to bid on keywords people search for and its sister program AdSense allows website owners to place these ads on their website and share a portion of the profit with Google. The yearly revenues gained from their ad programs is in the tens of billions of dollars. By just browsing the Internet for 5 minutes, you will probably comes across hundreds if not thousands of “Ads by Google”. They own DoubleClick which accounts for a large portion of the graphical banner ads you see on various websites and their AdWords program is located on an websites covering hundreds of thousands of publishers. So If you are planning on doing any advertising on the Internet, Pay-Per-Click (Google Adwords) is definitely a program you are going to want to be part of. Google has built a brand around their simple logo and the prominence they have in the market place is not going to diminish any time soon.