Google Doodle Celebrates Martha Graham and Dynamic Web

Google used its latest doodle to not only celebrate the 117th birthday of American dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, but also to highlight the company's desire to make the Web more dynamic.

Who is Martha Graham? Born in 1894, she is widely credited as one of the biggest influences in modern dance, having created a whole new "dance language" that broke out of the stodgier and more old-fashioned ballet traditions. She's the first dancer to have ever performed at the White House, and choreographed over 180 works during her lifetime.

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Graham died in Manhattan in 1991 at the age of 96. Her legacy lives on through the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, which aims to teach many of the aspects of modern dance and ballet that she pioneered.

While the doodle certainly has historical significance, its dynamic nature may also have a broader significance. Google has been at the forefront of the so called ‘dynamic Web.' At the Google I/O conference, a whole session was devoted to its Pac-Man Doodle and how it was developed. The search engine itself has also become more dynamic: a great example of this is its Google Instant functionality.

Therefore the Martha Graham doodle isn't something too revolutionary: it's just Google highlighting what modern Web technologies are allowing Web developers to do, and timely because of Google's conference this week.

Not everybody is singing Google's praises though, claiming the doodle is actually slowing down page rendering. Several threads have popped up on Google's forums (see here, here, and here) complaining of issues.

"The Doodle is great...Here's the Problem...It's so Great that it is actually interfering with the Search Engine," poster ‘From The Pews' wrote. "It is causing it to respond slowly to key strokes and of course to actual searches. You may want to adjust your Doodle just a Tad..."


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