Google's Easter eggs Beyond the barrel rollThe Google "do a barrel roll" search caught plenty of attention this week--but it's only one of many Easter eggs the Internet giant has hidden around the Web. The company has been doing things its own, often nerdy way for years--basing its IPO price on e, the base of natural logarithms, for example, or showing pi in the sky at 3:14 a.m. with the right iGoogle theme. Also popping up are references to classic video games, science fiction books, and Lego.
It's a nice touch that gives a bit of personality to a company that has grown to become an Internet juggernaut of formidable influence. Some Easter eggs have come and gone--the Google Maps "pegman" mascot donning a tie-dye shirt when placed on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, for example, or the moon being made of green cheese. But many more live on. Click through to the gallery below to see a collection of many of the amusements Google has built into its products. Oh, those whimsical Google nerds. The Mountain View-based search giant may not have Apple’s design chops, but it certainly knows how to code a good joke.
We got a taste of that fact on Thursday with the highly popular “Do a Barrel Roll” search trick, which went viral on Twitter and brightened a million work days. But that’s only the latest in a long line of quirky features Google has embedded in its products. We’re not talking about useful stuff like the in-search calculator, or Google’s much-documented April Fool’s jokes. These are all fun built-in tricks you can amuse yourself with right now. Here's something interesting. Stop whatever you are doing and and go to the Google homepage. Type in the words "Do a barrel" in the search box and Google will surprise you. Your Google search engine results page will itself do "a barrel roll" before presenting you with the results.
This gag is the latest in a long line of Google easter eggs. Reportedly, the inspiration behind this is from Nintendo's Star Fox, a video game series, in which a space pilot rabbit named 'Peppy' tells the character Fox McCloud to "do a barrel roll".
"Today's fun query, 'do a barrel roll' was created by a Google software engineer with the primary goal of entertaining users - while showcasing the power of CSS3, a presentation feature of modern browsers. The 'do a barrel roll' query, which causes the search page to spin, will remain in place for a while," said a Google spokesperson.
It's a nice touch that gives a bit of personality to a company that has grown to become an Internet juggernaut of formidable influence. Some Easter eggs have come and gone--the Google Maps "pegman" mascot donning a tie-dye shirt when placed on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, for example, or the moon being made of green cheese. But many more live on. Click through to the gallery below to see a collection of many of the amusements Google has built into its products. Oh, those whimsical Google nerds. The Mountain View-based search giant may not have Apple’s design chops, but it certainly knows how to code a good joke.
We got a taste of that fact on Thursday with the highly popular “Do a Barrel Roll” search trick, which went viral on Twitter and brightened a million work days. But that’s only the latest in a long line of quirky features Google has embedded in its products. We’re not talking about useful stuff like the in-search calculator, or Google’s much-documented April Fool’s jokes. These are all fun built-in tricks you can amuse yourself with right now. Here's something interesting. Stop whatever you are doing and and go to the Google homepage. Type in the words "Do a barrel" in the search box and Google will surprise you. Your Google search engine results page will itself do "a barrel roll" before presenting you with the results.
This gag is the latest in a long line of Google easter eggs. Reportedly, the inspiration behind this is from Nintendo's Star Fox, a video game series, in which a space pilot rabbit named 'Peppy' tells the character Fox McCloud to "do a barrel roll".
"Today's fun query, 'do a barrel roll' was created by a Google software engineer with the primary goal of entertaining users - while showcasing the power of CSS3, a presentation feature of modern browsers. The 'do a barrel roll' query, which causes the search page to spin, will remain in place for a while," said a Google spokesperson.
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