Wednesday, January 4, 2006

Google Braille Logo

Google put up a very interesting colored Braille logo today, celebrating the birthday of Louis Braille on January 4th, 1809. This is one of the more brave logos for Google because it distorts the letters to the way you can’t read them anymore (without knowing Braille, that is).

Interestingly enough, Google doesn’t link to just louis braille this time when you click the logo. Now they link to louis braille birthdate, triggering a direct Q&A result on top of the results (will people in the future start to optimize for the “birthdate” word, hoping to give their artist/ inventor/ celebrity site a fat Googleboost one day?). So in a way, Wikipedia – which delivers the specific birthdate result – is first. And look what you can see on the Wikipedia page on Braille right now:

“In response to recent vandalism, editing of this page by new or anonymous users is temporarily disabled. Please discuss changes on this article’s talk page or request unprotection.”

This is protected introduction to Louis Braille on Wikipedia (which is followed by a one-page bio):

“Louis Braille (January 4, 1809–January 6, 1852) was the inventor of Braille, a world wide system used by blind and partially sighted people for reading and writing. Braille is read by passing the fingers over the characters that are made up of an arrangement of one-to-six embossed points. It has been adapted to almost every known language, from Afrikaans to Zulu. Louis Braille himself went blind from an accident at the age of four.”

The actual first site below the “Onebox” result at the moment is very slow, but not completely down yet.

More Braille...

On a side-note, I encoded another word in Braille. Can you read it?

[Thanks Orli Yakeul in the forum, Ido K.]

Google Braille Logo by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (16)

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