Google blunder over D-Day doodle

Google hurried out a link to material about D-Day beneath its logo

Google has hurriedly rushed out a link to D-Day material after failing to honour the 70th anniversary in its famous daily doodle.

Initially the UK homepage of the search engine had a doodle honouring a Japanese Go player.

It admitted to the Daily Telegraph that that had been uploaded in error, and quickly removed it.

Beneath its logo there is a now a link to letters, photos and maps of the Normandy landings.

The original doodle honoured the 185th birthday of Honinbo Shusaku

There was anger on Twitter about the goof.

"What were you thinking #Google?" asked one.

In response Google's director of communication Peter Barron said: "We always intended to highlight a new exhibition of imagery and archive material commemorating D-Day on our homepage.

"Unfortunately a technical error crept in and for a short period this morning an international doodle also appeared. We're sorry for the mistake, and we're proud to honour those who took part in D-Day"

The link to D-Day material takes users to the Google Cultural Institute, which has content on the Normandy landings and access to more than 400 records, some of them published for the first time.

The idea of marking cultural moments via the Google logo was born in 1998 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google's founders, placed a stick figure drawing behind the second 'o' in Google as a message to users that they were out of the office.

Later in the year a turkey was added on Thanksgiving Day, and two pumpkins were made out of the o's in October 1999.

Since 1998 there have been over 2,000 doodles on its home pages around the world, honouring major anniversaries and the birthdays of famous people including Albert Einstein and Michelangelo.

Google now has a full time doodle team of illustrators, animators and artists.