Google announced a new favicon today:

Essentially the new icon consists of four corners of blue, red, green and yellow (Google’s four colours) with a white “g” overlayed on the top. It’s certainly much nicer than the old one and makes my bookmarks bar look a lot more colourful.

But some guys in the Google Blogoscoped forum pointed out that it looks very similar to the logos of Windows and AVG logos.

Microsoft Windows

This is the “Vista” variation of the Windows logo. We’ve got red-green-yellow-blue. Rotate this clockwise by 90 degrees, add a g on the top and you’ve got the Google favicon.

AVG Antivirus

This time, we rotate the AVG logo by 90 degrees anticlockwise and add a g to get the Google favicon.

I guess four coloured squares isn’t actually a particularly imaginative logo so it’s not hard to accidently “copy” it. I doubt the guys at Google even realised!