Ask, Google, and Dogpile all changed their logos and themes in remembrance of MLK. 

More information can be found here.

Beginning in June of 2007, Google changed their algorithm, making more recent articles from blogs, in particular, appear at the top of the search results. Since then, more lower-quality (spam) pages began displaying more frequently than higher-ranked pages such as Wikipedia. Before this change, new blog posts took much longer to be displayed, often hours, and today blog posts will be displayed within a few minutes. Page Rank, which is an important factor in determining the ranking of sites, is almost completely disregarded with the speed sites are being listed at. 

Many saw a huge flaw in the algorithm with Google’s latest logo linking to results for the twenty-five year anniversary of in the invention of TCP/IP. The first result was for a Digg page linking to the second result, which is a spam blog set up simply to take advantage of the flaws. Out of the first ten results, only one consists of a fairly decent non-spam result, with the Wikipedia article appearing on the second page.

Perhaps Google will realize the greater problems this created, tweaking their search algorithm to include both recent and higher ranked/older pages. Possibly create further distinction between them - instead of simply listing the date. Other ideas may be to create a ‘Recently Added’ or similar tab as in the case of the blog search. For now you’ll just have to modify your searching to ‘January 1 tcp/ip+wikipedia’.

[via: Google Operating System]