Music fans, rejoice! The popularity of the playable Les Paul Google doodle has prompted the search engine to create a standalone site where users can play to their hearts' content.
"With all the great tunes you've created, we had to give the #LesPaul doodle a permanent home. Keep on rockin!" Google tweeted Friday night.
You can find the site at google.com/logos/2011/lespaul.html. Play the logo just as you did on the Google.com homepage; U.S. users can record and share their masterpieces.
The Thursday doodle, in honor of musician and electric guitar pioneer Les Paul, features the strings of a guitar in the shape of the Google logo. That logo is actually playable—strum it with your mouse and it plays a song. The concept is arguably now one of the search giant's most popular homepage creations. The company even left it up an additional day in the U.S. due to popular demand.
Here in the PCMag offices, the newsroom was filled with the sounds of amateur musicians crafting their own masterpieces all day Thursday. We eventually asked Chris Phillips, PCMag's creative director and an actual musician, to play us a real song and he mapped out directions for using the doodle to play the Beatles' "Here Comes the Sun."
Other users posted their creations to Twitter and Facebook, and uploaded to YouTube in droves. We selected a few favorites, and also checked out the celebrities who tried their hand at the doodle.
This is not the first doodle to get the standalone treatment. A May 2010 playable tribute to Pac-Man's 30th anniversary proved so popular that Google let it live on at Google.com/Pacman. According to one report, the doodle zapped nearly 4.8 million hours of our productivity.
An interactive tribute to Jules Verne, meanwhile, also proved very popular and also got its own site at www.google.com/logos/verne_hd.html. Rather than viewing the ocean through the "portholes" of the Google logo like the homepage doodle, the standalone site provides a picture window view of various sea creatures who move up and down with the ocean's tides. To navigate the scene, use the lever on the right to dive below the surface.
For more on Google's doodles, see the slideshow below.