In case you hadn’t noticed, the World Cup started last Friday and predictably, there’s been no shortage of big brands jumping on the bandwagon to empathise with fans’ excitement – with varying degrees of success.

Google, recently voted the world’s most valuable brand for the fourth consecutive year, has also climbed aboard. Before the tournament kicked off they made sure that all of the World Cup stadia were added to Google Street View.

Now the tournament is under way, they’ve subtly changed the way search results are presented when users search using the keyword ‘world cup’. At the bottom of the search page, instead of seeing the normal ‘Goooooooooogle’ page index, users see ‘Gooooooooooal!’ instead. Yesterday’s results and today’s fixtures are also directly displayed under the search box – very useful to your average football fan.

Interestingly, Microsoft’s Bing have tried a similar thing, but their effort seems a bit half-hearted in comparison.

Google’s changes may be subtle, but they’re an effective way of strengthening their brand in the eyes of users by portraying Google’s empathetic excitement towards the tournament with fans around the globe.

As we all know, Google has been cleverly changing their logo on their homepage for years to celebrate the dates of key events and this practice has proved very popular with users, strengthening their brand. These occasional changes will probably continue, but with the general online trend of users visiting search homepages less and less, as search becomes more and more integrated into web browsers and the wider web, their impact will reduce.  Expect to see more little touches to specific search result pages from Google in the future as a result.