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Today, according to IYA 2009 official website, is 400th anniversary of Galileo demonstrating his telescope to Venetian lawmakers. Google, with all the astronomy lovers like us, changed their homepage worldwide to mark the day.

It was 6am and I was forced to woke up early due to fighting noises over the phone call of my parents. I noticed the Google logo posted on pingooo’s plurk timeline (FYI, Plurk = a Twitter-like service in Taiwan), however I also noticed the tooltip (title=”) description on the Google Taiwan homepage was incorrectly translated.

On the English Google it reads “400th Anniversary of Galileo’s Telescope”, and on the Taiwanese homepage it was translated as “伽利略望遠鏡發明400周年”, which means “400th Anniversary since Galileo invented Telescope.”

Since pingooo himself works at Google, I replied pingooo’s plurk message, explaining that the home page was wrong, that telescopes was invented a long time ago since Galileo, what he did at the time was improved it and observed the heavenly body with it for the very first time. Within an hour the Google home page changed the sentence to the current version “伽利略天文望遠鏡發明400周年 (400th Anniversary since Galileo invented Astronomical Telescope)”. Quite fast for a big company such as Google.

Not sure if I am the first one to notify the error, it surely feels good to have a direct, Twitter-like channel to get in contact and to have things done.