I think this may be the first time that they’ve used the logo to honor another company or product. This must be the very pinnacle of both product placement and internet advertising, combined! Millions of people go to the Google homepage every day, so this gives Lego company a nice piece of exposure.

What would you need do if you’d like to get that sort of advertisement or endorsement?

Well, you’d likely need to be a product that Google employees particularly like, and have some sort of notable, date-associated event happen which doesn’t conflict with a major holiday or other observance. Barry Schwartz notes that Legos have long had a special place in the hearts of Googlers. Google founders Sergei Brin and Larry Page have apparently long enjoyed logos, even using them to build their first Google storage server cabinets:

(click to enlarge)
Photo of Google Servers from Stanford’s Computer History Museum.

Seriously, though, it seems fairly unlikely that anyone else could realistically aspire to achieving this sort of Google logo treatment. Perhaps even Google considers it to be a bit too much free promotion, since they didn’t opt to hyperlink it to a “lego” keyword search this time. As such, the logo is only giving Lego a bit of good brand-building vibes, along with the ALT text that reads:

“50th anniversary of the LEGO brick”

Also, it could be that Google is trying to avoid a bit of algorithmic chaos, since their algos notice whenever there’s a sudden spike in popularity for a particular keyword phrase. One or two past Google logo-promoted keyword searches allowed newly-introduced spam results to rise up onto the first page of results for the term, reducing quality.