Google celebrates Halloween with interactive Google Doodle

By Allison Matyus Published October 31, 2019

Image used with permission by copyright holder

To kick off the Halloween festivities early this year, the Google Doodle for Thursday is an interactive trick-or-treating game.

The doodle is a “choose your own” type of interactive Halloween adventure, featuring animals associated with the holiday, like tarantulas, bats, owls, and wolves. The Halloween Google Doodle is in partnership with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

Recommended Videos

You get to choose which of the seven doors to enter and choose either trick or treat for the animal that is inside of the door. If you choose trick, the animal will show off some type of hidden talent, but choosing treat gives a fact or two about the animal.

“Ding dong! Who’s that behind the door? Trick or Treat? The choice is yours,” Google said in its blog post.

For instance, you can either have a black jaguar shred on a keyboard, or learn that, unlike other cats, they love to swim.

Google has had an annual Halloween Google Doodle since the search engine’s early days in 1999. They’ve increasingly become more interactive over the years, like last year’s multiplayer Great Ghoul Duel which allowed players from all over the world to play each other one on one.

Other companies are getting in on the Halloween themes. Snapchat’s map feature within the app has gone dark for the holiday. The map is purple and spooky at night with pumpkins, cats, and candy corns littered around the map.

Pokémon Go kicked off its annual Halloween event earlier this month with rewards, seasonal items, and costumes for players to enjoy. Any Pokémon you transfer, catch, or hatch will reward you with double candy. This year’s Halloween event also features several iconic Pokémon dressing up as other Pokémon (yes, for real).

Even NASA got in on the spooky celebrations with the release of “Galaxy of Horrors,” a retro-inspired movie trailer and vintage posters meant to be informative about different exoplanets. The posters showcase that there’s more to exoplanets than finding planets similar to Earth. The exoplanets that harbor treacherous conditions are still equally important discoveries.

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Allison Matyus is a general news reporter at Digital Trends. She covers any and all tech news, including issues around social…

Mobile

The Google Home app is getting a long-overdue feature

According to the sleuths over at Android Authority, the Google Home app is about to get a much-needed feature that I'm honestly shocked hasn't been added yet: a search bar.

If you've never used the Google Home app before, it's sort of the command center for all things smart home in the Google smart home ecosystem. If you only have a few smart home devices, it's easy enough to navigate — but if you have an extensive smart home setup, you could have upwards of 50 devices listed in the app. If you don't take time to organize and label them, it gets unwieldy fast.

Computing

Microsoft Word vs. Google Docs

A person using a laptop that displays various Microsoft Office apps.

For the last few decades, Microsoft Word has been the de facto standard for word processors across the working world. That's finally starting to shift, and it looks like one of Google's productivity apps is the heir apparent. The company's Google Docs solution (or to be specific, the integrated word processor) is cross-platform and interoperable, automatically syncs, is easily shareable, and perhaps best of all, is free.

However, using Google Docs proves it still has a long way to go before it can match all of Word's features -- Microsoft has been developing its word processor for over 30 years, after all, and millions still use Microsoft Word. Will Google Docs' low barrier to entry and cross-platform functionality win out? Let's break down each word processor in terms of features and capabilities to help you determine which is best for your needs.
How does each word processing program compare?
To put it lightly, Microsoft Word has an incredible advantage over Google Docs in terms of raw technical capability. From relatively humble beginnings in the 1980s, Microsoft has added new tools and options in each successive version. Most of the essential editing tools are available in Google Docs, but users who are used to Word will find it limited.

Mobile

Google is about to make it a lot easier to customize your Pixel phone

A person holding the Google Pixel 8.

When you first set up a phone, it's essentially the same as every other phone. Customizing it to suit you is part of the fun. Google looks to be making this process a lot easier with a redesigned "Wallpaper & style" page for Pixel phones and tablets.

The news comes courtesy of Android Authority, which first discovered the updated wallpaper app in the Android 15 QPR1 beta (with a full release expected in December).