Google Comes Out…Sort Of

Google is known for the Doodles. These creative ways of displaying the Google logo recently have had us playing guitar, remembering Richard Scary (where was Golden Bug?), and playing Pacman for hours.  Has Google now gone gay?

Today if you go to the Google homepage, you won’t see any creative doodles.  It’s just the plain old Google logo.  But not so fast.  Try searching for “homosexuality“.  When the results come up you’ll notice on the right of the search bar is a rainbow.  The same rainbow is shown when you search for any gay-related keyword.  That’s because all this month Google is celebrating gay pride.

“During the month of June, Google is celebrating lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Pride,” the company said in an e-mail. “For some Pride-related search queries, we are showing a rainbow at the end of the search bar.” according to John D. Sutter at CNN.

Ironically, in their attempt to join with the homosexual movement, they ended up irritating some people in the gay community due to the hidden nature of this Doodle (if you can call it that).

“Instead of boldly declaring its support of Gay and Lesbian Pride Month, Google added a tiny rainbow to the end of its search bar,” writes Nicholas Jackson in the Atlantic.

It seems to me Google is trying to ride the fence on this one by showing their support to the gay community, but trying to hide it from the rest of the searching world.  Maybe they were afraid of a backlash is the fully came out…Then again, maybe they just didn’t want to have a gay-themed doodle on their site for an entire month.  Either way, as often happens when you try to play both sides, it looks like Google may end up irritating everyone.

What do you think?

Is this just what you have to do to be a big business these days?

Does this effect your decision of which search engine to use?

Does this effect your decision of whether you use Adwords or Adsense?