NASA said yesterday it had discovered water on the moon, and Google — always big on space exploration — wasted no time producing a special logo to celebrate the event.

Google’s backing a contest to put a private rover on the moon. Who knows? Maybe one of those rovers will visit sources of water. And we’ll get a new logo to celebrate that.

If you visit Google.com today, you will see a special logo for Veterans Day. The logo is less complex when compared to last years, where Google had to fix their Veterans Day logo. Last year, Google placed hats on top of each letter on the Google logo, the hats included Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines. But they forgot one, the U.S. Coast Guard, which they added later.

Google also has a logo on Google.co.uk for Remembrance Day:

Bing has a Veterans Day Theme:

Yahoo typically skips adding a special logo for today, which is what they have done today. But you can see more logos, from Ask.com, AOL and others at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Today marks the official 40th anniversary for Sesame Street and Google is providing some of the logos they showed on Google.com for high resolution download over here. In addition, Google said they are a supporter of the non-profit Sesame Workshop.

Google has been showing logos for the past several days, leading up to the 40th anniversary. Some of the logos ended up being controversial in that some felt Google should have shown the Berlin Wall logo globally. In any event, the Sesame Street Logos were fun and enjoyable.

I posted all 12 logos at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Today is the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street and the 20th of Wallace and Gromit, the two beloved children shows. For the special day, Google has several logos (doodles) up at the various Google properties, depending on the local preference of show.

Big Bird is the most noticed one and it is featured in the US and on 21 regional versions of Google:

Wallace & Gromit is featured in the UK and on 7 regional versions of Google:

This Sesame Street logo is on Google.be and Google.nl:

This one on Google.co.za:

This one on Google.co.in:

This one on Google.com.mx:

This one on Google.co.il:

Postscript: The Google Blog posted about this logo just minutes ago.

Postscript #2:

On November 5th, Google continued the anniversary celebration by showing off Cookie Monster:

Then on November 6th, adding a third day by showing Ernie & Bert:

Today is Halloween and the search engines have logos up for the special day. Before I post the logos, here are some posts from others in the community on Halloween.

Matt Cutts of Google had a holy costume. Google Blogoscoped noticed Google added trick or treat to their robots.txt file. Bing has a special visual search edition for today. Bruce Clay’s team dressed up and PPC Heros added some funk. Finally, the logos you see below is reposted from the Search Engine Roundtable.

Google has four Doodles:

Yahoo (Flash):

AOL (Flash):

YouTube:

Bing:

Ask.com:

Dogpile:

BruceClay’s design:

Search Engine Roundtable:

For the past logos, see 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005 and 2004 logos.

No, Google is not for sale. (At least as far as we know.) That barcode logo on the Google home page and its search results pages is in honor of the 57th anniversary of the barcode being patented: October 7, 1952 to Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver.

If you’re thinking that Google’s really upped its pace of publishing special logos lately, I’d have to agree. A quick glance at our Google Logos archive suggests this is at least the seventh Google doodle in the last month.

Today, a 140 years ago, Gandhi was born and Google wants you to know that. If you visit Google.com today, you will see a special logo for Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the political and spiritual leader of India during the Indian independence movement. The logo links you to a Google search result for, you guessed it, [gandhi].

Today is also International Day of Non-Violence, which is out of respect for Gandhi’s birthday.

Google is celebrating Confucius’ birthday with a new logo that has the Chinese philosopher standing in place of the “l” in Google’s regular logo. September 28, 551 BC, is traditionally recognized as Confucius’ birthday.

Somewhat oddly, however, the Confucius doodle isn’t showing up on Google.com or on Google France. “We don’t always show every doodle on every domain,” a Google spokesperson tells us. “As you can imagine, it’s sometimes tough to make these decisions but we aim to pick doodles that are most relevant to most users in any given country.” The Confucius doodle can be found on Google’s country-specific search engines in the UK, Germany, Spain, Austria, Russia, Serbia, and elsewhere. It was also shown on Google Australia and Google New Zealand (where it’s already September 29 as I write this).

By the way, if you’re into following Google’s doodles (and we know some of you are), you may want to check out a new site called Doodle Source, which tracks and archives new Google doodles appearing worldwide. Right now the site only has Google’s most recent doodles, but they plan to add all of the company’s logos going back to 1999.

Google has a special logo up on September 27, 2009 to celebrate their eleventh birthday. Here is the logo, which is available on Google properties where it is already Sunday.

Happy Birthday Googlle!

See also our earlier post, Google Is 10 Years Old? Finding The Real Google Birthday, on how Google’s birthday has moved around to various dates in September. 

Google’s 10th Birthday Logo covers last year’s logo and Google 10th Birthday Site: Interactive Timeline, Project 10×100 To Improve The World & Share Your Google Stories covers a special web site the company created for its first 10 years.

Google has come clean on what all these flying saucers Google Doodles were about. It is to honor the 143rd birthday of H.G. Wells, the Father of Science Fiction, who’s birthday is today.

We actually expected this logo to show up today. Many of the logos, Google tweets and evidence or hints, Google dropped, kind of led to this. This is the first time Google actually put together a few logos to honor a single person’s birthday. Clearly, Google was having fun with this.

The previous logos were on September 5th and 15th. The 5th logo was named the unexplained phenomenon logo and the 15th was the crops circles logo.

For more coverage on this H.G. Wells logo, see Techmeme.