Ready, set, search! As the world converged on Paris in Summer 2024, we wanted to celebrate what people love about the Olympic and Paralympic Games, Paris, and the wider world of sports. So we reimagined our Doodle Playground for the global stage, this time built for even more play with new games-within-the-game and hidden gems. By building an unmissable campaign in one of Google’s most visible places — the Google Doodle — we aimed for record global engagement to bring more delight and fun competition to one of the biggest cultural moments of the year. The Most Searched Playground: Paris 2024 invited people to uncover 20 most searched trends plus secret mini-games and lots of fun easter eggs celebrating Olympic culture and Parisian flair.
For Paris 2024, The Most Searched Playground struck us as the perfect interactive to launch, celebrating the world’s love of play. The Playground is a search-and-find game where people uncover objects representing most-searched Trends from Google Search. To capture the magic of this major global event, we went bigger. Beyond the core experience, we developed brand new mini-games and personalized features, and centered accessibility and disability inclusion in every aspect.
Our concept was to build an imaginative, one-of-a-kind, Parisian scavenger hunt park where people discover beloved Paris 2024-themed topics, from football and breakdancing to croissants and Daft Punk. The front door of the experience was Google’s homepage — via special Google Doodles of Parisian birds playing Olympic and Paralympic sports — as well as the Google Search app and owned social channels. Transported to a huge maze of activity, people explored or utilized clues to spot the hidden trends. Once found, these objects unlocked more unique Search insights related to the topic. Throughout the exploration, there were numerous French culture easter eggs to stumble upon, such as “la bise” or a debate about “pain au chocolat” vs. “chocolatine.”
Along the way, players could discover additional “Sports Side Quests.” Two of these were retro-style mini-games nestled in the arcade area: Birdie Baller and Squawk Drop. These added a new style of gameplay to the experience, either shooting hoops into a moving net or skateboarding through Paris to avoid obstacles and earn points. Building these games from scratch with the appropriate difficulty level, and with accessible features, was a significant challenge in the process. The games also tied in brand elements from elsewhere in the campaign, namely the charming birds from the Google Doodles. The third Sports Side Quest was spotting 10 Greek Gods and Goddesses who were dropped right into the sporting action. Finding them connected people to real-time Search information for the corresponding Olympic event.
With all of these ways to play, we built a player profile experience, awarded to those who found all 20 most searched trends. It highlighted a personalized “Search Style” based on their unique interactions with the Playground, as well as their stats on the Sports Side Quests.
To pull off this ambitious work, our team collaborated closely with an illustration partner, creating 2000+ unique characters and moments. It was essential that the Playground of Paris 2024 feel rich, diverse, and global, so everyone could see themselves reflected. Especially in celebration of the Paralympics, we highlighted athletes and spectators across abilities, built an entirely wheelchair-accessible landscape, and developed accessible sound design in the arcade games for players that are blind or low-vision. These new accessibility developments expanded our baseline UX of alt-text and sound clues in the core game.
Our final challenge in the Most Searched Playground: Paris 2024 was to ensure that people around the world could join in the fun, so we launched the experience in 20 global markets, with localized content, which included insights, hints, Search Style descriptions, and more.
The Most Searched Playground: Paris 2024’s purpose was to bring delight and playfulness to a massive cultural moment, and the experience succeeded in immersing people all over the world in a fun maze of beloved sports and French culture icons. The Playground proved to be an ideal opportunity for fun competition around a huge collective moment that celebrates sports.
Across our Olympics and Paralympics launches, the Playground garnered 150 years of cumulative engagement time, with nearly 85 million most searched trends found. An impressive 55M+ people joined in on the fun (2.2x last year’s Playground), dedicating an average of two-and-a-half minutes to the experience, with over 2M people finding all 20 objects. Of the 17.8M playing users, the average player found five of the 20 objects.
600K+ people played at least one of the secret Sports Side Quest mini-games (one user even played Squawk Drop 670 times in one session). The high scores for Birdie Baller and Squawk Drop were 590 and 2,137, respectively, validating the effectiveness of the new mini-games in promoting engagement and gameplay. Notably, 72% of users were from outside the United States, which speaks to the worldwide appeal of the Playground and the most searched concept. Outside of the US, the Playground was most visited in India, Japan, Brazil, and the UK.
Overall, the Most Searched Playground affirmed the love for this interactive experience, as it was one of our most successful Doodle launches to date.
