Google received the royal seal of approval

Google received the royal seal of approval on Thursday when it added a picture of the Queen to the logo on its British homepage to mark her visit to its London offices on Thursday.

The specially-commissioned image, called a "Google doodle", shows the Queen in profile and a golden crown above the letter E of Google.

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh will tour the Internet search giant's British headquarters, a short walk from Buckingham Palace in central London.

"Doodles" on Google's search engine homepage change periodically to mark occasions such as national holidays and anniversaries of major events.

The royal party will meet Google executives and hear about the company's search engine, advertising and mobile phone technology. They will also learn how Google Earth, an online map, is being used to help save the Amazon rainforest.

The Queen will then be invited to upload a video to the royal family's official channel on YouTube, the video-sharing site owned by Google. The address is here

Royal e-mail

During the visit to Google's offices in Victoria, the Queen and Prince Philip are meeting Nikesh Arora, the president of Google's Europe, Middle East and Africa operations, as well as key UK staff.

They are being shown a series of demonstrations explaining Google's various operations, and meeting schoolchildren who won a competition to design new "doodles".

The Queen has kept up to date with technological changes over the decades, sending an e-mail for the first time when she visited an army base in 1976, according to Buckingham Palace.

In 1997 she launched the official royal website and in 2006 she made her annual Christmas message available for download as a podcast.

Last Christmas she launched a dedicated royal channel on YouTube which now contains 54 royal videos and has been visited by 1.6m people.