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Answer: THE GOGOS

by Dai Yang

The puzzle contains 8 images that are assembled from Google Doodles, which are artistic reinterpretations of the Google logo on the homepage usually commemorating a person or event of significance, as well as 8 phrases that look like search queries.

To start, note that each image contains the left half of a Google Doodle, and the right half of another Google Doodle. The two halves together contain 5 of the 6 letters of “GOOGLE”, or at least symbols that correspond to letters via shape or color. This gives an index from 1 to 6 for the missing letter in-between, and also hints that there is a special Doodle between the two Doodles shown. Indeed, using the left-and-right navigation on https://www.google.com/doodles, solvers can find that there is an interactive game Doodle between each pair of Doodles. To help with identification, the images are presented in chronological order based on the date when the Doodles were aired, and Doodles that aired separately in multiple countries have a flag symbol in the corner for disambiguation.

The list of Doodles is as follows:

Left Doodle Interactive Doodle Right Doodle Missing Index
Lebanon Independence Day 2013 Doctor Who's 50th Anniversary Teacher's Day 2013 (Turkey) 5
Qatar National Day 2013 100th Anniversary of the Crossword Puzzle Holiday Series 2013 #1 3
Teacher's Day 2015 (Ecuador) 155th Anniversary of the Pony Express Khmer New Year 2015 4
Venezuela National Day 2015 Eiji Tsuburaya's 114th Birthday Aiga Rasch’s 74th Birthday 2
Grandma's Day 2016 (Poland) Wilbur Scoville's 151th Birthday Grandpa's Day 2016 (Poland) 5
Lantern Festival 2017 (Taiwan) Valentine's Day 2017 Serbia National Day 2017 4
Mountain Day 2017 44th Anniversary of the Birth of Hip Hop Mother's Day 2017 (Thailand) 2
Turkey National Day 2020 Halloween 2020 Eloisa Angulo's 101st Birthday 5

To answer the search queries, solvers need to play the interactive Doodles to figure out which queries they are related to.

🔍 what is the penalty for getting one of my dapper fellows exterminated oops

In the Doctor Who game, if the well-dressed player character collides with the Dalek, the latter will chant “Exterminate!” while zapping the Doctor, which penalizes the player by adding a MINUTE to the timer.

🔍 who vindicated herself by playing ten records please tell me (stage) last name

There are ten trophies that can be obtained in the Hip Hop freestyle game, one of which is to play ten records. Doing so reveals the story behind Roxanne’s Revenge, by Roxanne SHANTÉ.

🔍 what is the prefix of the fish who chomps me in the abyss

The fourth level of the speed-drawing game Cat Magic Academy 2 occurs in the Abyss under the sea, where the player character Momo must face a giant ANGLER fish.

🔍 what kind of animal can help me dance near bamboo thicket please dont say panda

The third objective in the game Pangolin Love is to learn a dance in China by collecting ribbons. After passing a panda couple and some bamboo, players can find ribbons inside a large DRAGON by entering through its mouth.

🔍 what should cameras do to the flying dude after the wires are connected

The flying dude refers to the hero of a tokusatsu film-in-the-making (whose appearance resembles that of Ultraman) in the style of Eiji Tsuburaya. After attaching the harnesses, players are instructed to FOLLOW the hero.

🔍 where is the ridiculously buff scorpion from i need to know village name

Players must defeat a giant pepper with beefy musculature using no more than three ice cream scoops in the game commemorating Wilbur Scoville’s birthday. This pepper is introduced as the Trinidad MORUGA Scorpion.

🔍 what goes through a mechanical breakdown and a gradually narrowing tube in that order

Both MALFUNCTION (mechanical breakdown) and FUNNEL (gradually narrowing tube) are horizontal answers in the Doodle celebrating the 100th anniversary of crossword puzzles. The unique vertical answer that intersects both is 8-Down, or ALOTOF.

🔍 what things get thrown at me if i go over the x

In the third and last portion of the Pony Express game, if players step on the X markings on the ground, bandits will catch them using LASSOS and reduce their envelope score.

Each query answer has length 6, and by indexing into query answers using the missing letter of GOOGLE in the corresponding image, we get THE GOGOS as the answer.

Author’s Notes

Seeing an interactive Google Doodle is often a delightful surprise, and Magic Cat Academy is my personal favorite. I wanted to give solvers an excuse to (re)play some of the most well-received Doodles. Initial versions of this puzzle had a much longer data collection step, but it was shortened once it became evident during testsolving that looking at static Doodles isn't nearly as fun as playing interactive Doodles (though some of the static ones are artistically interesting).