Today, Saturday, March 17, 2012, is St. Patrick’s Day, and Google has a doodle, of course (pictured above). As they often do, Google’s doodle appeared in other parts of the world (like Australia) before making its way here to the U.S.

As a colleague pointed out, the doodle focuses more on art than on drinking, which has become the true meaning of the holiday to some, despite its cultural and religious origins.

If you want to compare the doodle to last year’s (which wasn’t so much about drinking either), you can see it in this Google Doodle compilation:

By the way, in light of Google’s increased push on semantic search and direct answers, it’s worth noting that a Google search for “St. Patty’s Day” returns a direct answer for St. Patrick’s Day:

Of course, talk and the sharing of imagery and videos related to the holiday are all over the social networks, including Google’s own Google+. In fact, it becomes pretty clear that Google+ is no ghost town if you do a search for St. Patrick’s Day, as you can watch the new posts roll in pretty quickly.

Here are some videos that are popping up:

Of course, Google’s Doodle is more about the web search part of Google, and clicking it will simply take you to the query for “St. Patrick’s Day”. Google thinks this Wikipedia entry for St. Patrick’s Day is the best result for that. Do you agree?