US teenager's touching doodle wins Google contest

A teenager's poignant drawing of her 'best day ever,' when she was 10-years-old and her father returned from his 18-month deployment in Iraq, bagged the first spot in the 2013 'Doodle 4 Google' contest.

Sabrina Brady's drawing was shown on the Google homepage all day on Thursday.

The high school senior told NBC that her victory was shocking, the New York Daily News reported.

The eighteen-year-old said her father went during a time when every little girl has her "daddy moment" and she used to miss him.

The contest instructions were to draw your "best day ever," and students from kindergarten to 12th grade participated.

Ryan Germick, Doodle team lead, wrote in a blog post: "Sabrina's doodle stood out in the crowd."

"Her creative use of the Google letters to illustrate this heartfelt moment clearly resonated with voters across the country and all of us at Google," Germick wrote.

Google selected 250 state finalists from the 130,000 submissions and then the panel of judges picked 50 state winners.

The public then voted on their favourite doodles from each of the five age groups.

After the five national finalists were determined, Google executives selected the national winner.

This year's guest judges included Katie Couric, Olympic gold medalist Aly Raisman and Brian Henson, the chairman of The Jim Henson Co.