Readers who visited El Reg last Saturday will be aware that we proudly ran our annual St George masthead - in keeping with the Vulture Central tradition of celebrating the national days of those countries where we have either a substantial readership or from which we hope to extract the most advertising revenue.

Of course, where the Register leads, others invariably follow, and search monolith Google has been running its own series of commemorative mastheads for a few years now. For example, dates considered worthy of note during 2004 included St. Patrick's Day, the transit of Venus, Ray Charles birthday and, happily, St. George's Day.

However, 23 April 2005 on Google saw a decided lack of blokes attacking dragons with lances. This outrage prompted reader Tarrant Costelloe to demand an explanation. Google duly replied:

Thank you for your note about the Google homepage. We enjoy celebrating holidays at Google and are sorry we missed one that's special to you, such as St. George's Day. As you may imagine, it is difficult for us to choose which events to celebrate on our site. We have a long list of holidays that we would like to celebrate in the future. We have to balance this rotating calendar with the need to maintain the consistency of the Google homepage. Additionally, as you may know, we celebrated St. George's Day last year.

Some holidays that we have celebrated in the past will be rotated into our holiday doodles for future years. Please remember you can visit any of our doodles at http://www.google.co.uk/holidaylogos.html. We are committed to celebrating the diversity of our users worldwide and we'll keep your thoughtful feedback in mind for the future.

Regards, The Google Team

Well, we're sorry, but if Google can find time to stick up a tribute to World Water Day (22 March 2005) then we reckon there's plenty of room for England's patron saint. Accordingly, we demand a public apology and commemoration of one of the following by way of recompense: Battle of Britain Day (15 September); Trafalgar Day (21 October); The Day England Won the World Cup Day (30 July).

And if we don't get satisfaction in the matter, then by the Lord Harry we'll use another search engine to track down Paris Hilton's topless mobe snaps. Consider the gauntlet duly thrown down. ®

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