Google announced the winner of their “Doodle 4 Google” contest yesterday, having received 33,000 entries for the K-12 competition that riffs on the Google logo for their homepage.

9-year-old Mackenzie Melton, who is in the third grade at El Dorado Springs R-2 Schools in El Dorado, Missouri, claimed the top prize. Animation and illustration biggies like Disney, The Sesame Street Workshop, Dr. Seuss Enterprises, Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates and Peanuts and Pixar Animation Studios judged the 40 finalists in the contest, but Mackenzie’s rainforest themed entry won out. She says:

I chose this doodle because the rainforest is in danger and it is not fair to the plants and animals. I love everything except spiders and snakes, but I would still save them.

Mackenzie bagged a $15,000 scholarship, a netbook and a $25,000 tech upgrade for her school. Her creation, rendered in colored pencils, is featured today on Google’s homepage as the Google Doodle. Students in three other categories- Raymundo Marquez of Eagle Pass, Texas, Vance Viggiano of Long Valley, New Jersey, and Bevan Schiffli of Highlands, North Carolina, received netbooks as runners-up in the contest.

Missouri 9-year-old wins ‘Doodle 4 Google’ contest is a post from: The Inquisitr

I realize that this news will really only apply to a small segment of readers, those one’s not swimming in the Google kool-aid at least, but when it comes to Bing one of the that has become a bit of a consumer hit is its homepage photos. The photos change everyday but now they’ll be changing in more countries with pictures of those countries.

Starting next month these additional countries will include: Australia, Canada, China, Japan, and the UK. these countries will have customized photos with their own hotspots of mouse over information. Now sticking with the homepage photos for a second one of the really neat things that has come out of these homepage photos is Bing fans have begun collecting them in order to share all the ones that have been displayed so far.

The best project so far is the one that Long Zheng has put together over at the Bing Image Archive which is where you can find all the background images presented in a calendar format that you can scroll through to see what image was shown on what day.

Now on to the contest.

The Bing team is launching their first photo submission via Facebook. The theme is summer travel and the winner will have their photo displayed on the Bing homepage on Monday, August 3rd. If interested head over to the Bing contest on Facebook and check out the rules and such. Good luck.

hat tip to LiveSide

More Bing homepage photos plus a photo contest is a post from: The Inquisitr