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Congratulations also go to the three national finalists. They were selected as having the best doodle in their grade groups and will each receive a laptop computer:

Grades K-3
Spencer Norton ~ Ashbrook Elementary School, Lumberton, NJ

Grades 7-9

Rebecca Olene ~ Pioneer Ridge Freshmen Center, Carver, Minnesota

Grades 10-12

Gabriel Kitzman ~ Elbert School Dist. #200, Kiowa, Colorado

To celebrate our winner and all of the talented finalists, we held an awards ceremony at the Googleplex for the 40 regional winners today. The finalists and their families joined us for a fun-filled day with activities ranging from face painting to a doodling master class with our own Chief Google Doodler Dennis Hwang, and we couldn't have had more fun.

Thanks to everyone who participated in this year's Doodle 4 Google competition. We enjoyed seeing the creativity and imagination of students across the U.S. and hope you did too.

  • Express your views and create more content: Blogger.

  • Scrap your friends in your language: orkut.



You can now also try out our brand new English to Hindi translation service, and the translated search feature that lets you query in Hindi, obtain search results for the translated query in English, and then see the Hindi translations of these results.



For more information on all of these, read our press release.

You can see a long-term decline in pages encoded in ASCII (unaccented letters A through Z). More recently, there's been a significant drop in the use of encodings covering only Western European letters (ASCII and a few accented letters like Ä, Ç, and Ø). We're seeing similar declines in other language-specific encodings. Unicode, on the other hand, is showing a sharp increase in usage.

This is based on our indexing of web pages, and thus may vary somewhat from what other search engines find. However, the trends are pretty clear, and the continued rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the processing for the many languages that we cover.