Considering that it’s also nearly Easter, and I’m a much bigger fan of Easter Eggs than practical jokes, I thought for April 1st this year, I’d reveal some of Google’s Easter Eggs – they have many of them, which proves they’ve got a sense of humour. (Just in case you weren’t already aware of it.)
- Searching for “askew” or “tilt” using Google will cause the search results to be displayed at a slight angle.
- Searching for “Atari Breakout” and then clicking Images will start a game of Breakout using the image results as bricks. When one wins it searches something else randomly and plays again.
- Searching for “Do a barrel roll” or “z or r twice” will cause the search result to rotate 360 degrees when showing. This is often connected with Nintendo’s Star Fox games.
- Searching for “zerg rush” causes a bunch of Google “o”s to attack the result page and eventually destroy it; the user can, however, fight back by tapping on them. After destroying the results, the “o”s then arrange themselves into ‘GG’, meaning “Good Game”.
- Searching for “Bletchley Park” will cause the title of the info card to appear as if it was being deciphered by Google. This is a reference to the fact that Bletchley Park, in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, was the central site of the United Kingdom’s Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), which during the Second World War regularly penetrated the secret communications of the Axis Powers.
- Searching for “kerning” will increase the spacing between every letter in the word kerning by 1 pixel whenever it shows up in the search results page. Conversely, searching for “keming” (a common example of unfortunate kerning) will decrease the spacing between letters of the word when it shows up in the search results page.
- Searching for any actor’s name followed by “bacon number” returns the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon value.
- Searching for “recursion” will result in Google asking if the user meant “recursion.”
- Searching for “Conway’s Game of Life” produces the Life simulation described by Conway. It will spell “Google” if the user looks closely.
- Searching for “how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood” using “Search by voice” produces a vocal response of another tongue twister “A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood”.
- Searching for “Festivus” places a Festivus pole in the left side of the window, and the text showing the results displays “A festivus miracle!” next to it.
- Searching for “anagram” results in the search engine asking “Did you mean: nag a ram” (“nag a ram” is an anagram of the word “anagram”)
- Searching for “Google in 1998” results in a 1998 Google search screen appearing in place of the current Google search screen. Clicking on the first result will bring the user to the Wayback Machine’s version of Google from 1998. However, clicking I’m Feeling Lucky will go to a page showing google’s history in depth.
- Searching for “Google Pacman” has a playable version of the game appear on the screen.
- Searching for the film star Jason Isaacs returns “Hello to Jason Isaacs”, a reference to the BBC Radio 5 live film review program with Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo.
- Searching ‘who are you’ using the voice recognition search causes the voiceover to say ‘searching for oneself may take a lifetime. But a good place to start is classic rock.’
- Searching for “beam me up, Scotty” using voice search produces a vocal response that says “I cannot do it, Captain, I do not have the power.” in an impersonation of the character Mr. Scott from Star Trek.
- Searching for “What does the fox say?” using voice search produces various vocal responses from the song of the same name by Ylvis.
- Searching for “flip a coin”, will show a virtual coin toss at the top of the search results page. Similarly, searching for “roll a die” will create a die rolling simulator below the search bar.
- Searching for “make me a sandwich” using Google voice search will get one of two responses, #1 “What? Make it yourself” #2 “Poof you’re a sandwich!”.
- Searching for “marquee HTML” makes the result stats emulate a marquee element and scroll horizontally
- Searching for “blink HTML” or “blink tag” includes samples of the blink element in the results
- Searching for “hodor” shows randomly generated “hodor” text, including capital and lowercase versions of the word “hodor”.
- Searching for “webdriver torso” shows the Google logo in the top left corner imitate the videos, with animated coloured rectangles.
Personally, I love the first one. The tilt thing just really tickles my funnybone.
I love discovering some of the cool Easter Eggs you can find on the Internet.
And did you know I have my own Easter Eggs planted about my site? <wink>
If you like these Easter Eggs, I’ll list some more when it’s actually Easter.
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