Hey Google World Cup Calendar – Can You Make Your Mind Up?

Google introduced a couple of neat features today in preparation for the 2010 World Cup (whoopie – can’t wait). The first was changing the pagination numbers at the bottom of the page to read “Gooooal” instead of “Goooogle”:

Everyone loved this; Mashable featured it on their post (1100 Tweets at the time of writing this; I mean honestly) and Matt Cutts even tweeted about it during SMX. OK, so it’s nice that Google is showing some support for the World Cup, but it’s not really much use now is it?

However, Google also added something considerably more interesting to the search result pages in the form of a nifty World Cup Calendar. I noticed this in the morning when searching for World Cup. It also shows for other related searches such as World Cup 2010, WC 2010 or World Cup Calendar (as Malcolm Coles tweeted later that afternoon). It’s not a total broad match though; there’s no World Cup Calendar displayed for the search World Cup Venues for example.

Now, this is where it gets a bit confusing. During the afternoon the calendar looked like this (click to make bigger):

Very nifty like I said; I particularly liked that it lists the UK times and even shows me which TV channel the games will be shown on. A little later in the evening, I had a thought about if Google would have listed Sky as the TV channel if they’d been the broadcaster (you know, given how Rupert Murdoch and Google don’t get along). There’s a hilarious tweet in there I’m sure.

Anyway, I searched again and this time I was presented with the following World Cup Calendar:

Note how now the times are South African rather than UK and in addition the TV channels are no longer listed. I tried refreshing, disabling search history, trying a different browser and this alternative version just wouldn’t budge. Then after a short time, the UK time version reappeared…then reverted back…then reappeared again!

I guess the question is why are Google alternating between different versions of the calendar? There’s nothing to click so I’m not really sure what they’re hoping to achieve with this one. Hey, it’s still a neat feature though; hopefully they can keep it updated (with UK times and channels please) for the duration of the tournament

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