Even as office bosses complain of their employees being busy on the keyboards to play Google's interactive Olympic doodles thereby affecting the organisation's productivity, the search engine major on Thursday brought out its third playable interactive doodle for the London Olympics 2012.

The doodle features slalom canoeing. This is Goodle's 14th Olympics 2012 doodle.

This incidentally is the first doodle that the search engine major has featured after the actual event at the Olympics has got over.

The doodle features a paddler in a yellow canoe trying to paddle his way along a water-course. The course has some (10) downstream gates marked with green striped poles.

In order to play the game, users need to use the left and right arrow keys to paddle faster while the up and down keys help to navigate the canoe.

The speed of the canoe comes down once it hits the banks, water animals or rocks. Successfully guiding it through the striped pols increases the speed. Time is added if the speed of the canoe is slowed.

Guiding the canoe through the course will help the user earn a star and the faster the course is completed, the more number of stars are added. Users can add a maximum of three.

Of course, the user can flaunt his achievements in the game through GooglePlus — the search engine's social networking site.

In the actual event, athletes negotiate a 250-metre white water course that flows at a rate of 13 cubic metres per second, and drops 5.5 metres from start to finish.

Canoe Slalom made its debut at the Munich 1972 Olympic Games, but did not become a permanent part of the Olympic programme until Barcelona in 1992.

On Wednesday the interactive Google doodle featured basketball, which users played by using the space bar or through the mouse. Its first ever interactive doodle came out on Tuesday and featured hurdle racing.

>abhishek.l@thehindu.co.in

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