Google Easter eggs
Various Google services hides Easter eggs meant to be amusing entertainment.
- Searching for "the loneliest number" will make the calculator answer 1.
- Searching for "the answer to life, the universe, and everything" will make the Calculator answer 42, a reference to Douglas Adams's novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In order for this Easter egg to be successful the phrase must be entered in lowercase and without the quotation marks. The same reference is made when speaking to an artificial intelligence called meliza next to "the face on Mars" in Google Earth. When the number 42 is typed, the AI produces the output "42 is the answer to the ultimate question about life, the universe, and everything."
- Searching for "the number of horns on a unicorn" produces the answer "1" in the Calculator. (Google actually reads the strings "number of horns on a unicorn" and "answer to life the universe and everything" as numbers. One can also use these phrases in the calculator. For example searching for "number of horns on a unicorn usd in euro" produces the current dollar / euro course or searching for "answer to life the universe and everything*5" produces 210.)
- Searching for "once in a blue moon" shows the result "1.16699016 × 10-8 hertz".
- Searching for "recursion" shows "Did you mean: recursion".
- Google offers services in many languages, including several uncommon ones like Swedish Chef's Bork bork bork, Pig Latin, Hacker (usually known as leetspeak), Elmer Fudd, Klingon and Pirate
- When asked how to get from a location in North America to a location in Europe or Africa, Google Maps included the instruction "Swim across the Atlantic Ocean". This Easter egg is now removed.
- When asked for directions from North America to Australia or island in the Pacific ocean Google Maps includes the instruction "Kayak across the Pacific Ocean". This also works in Google Earth.
- When asked for directions from Japan to China, Google Maps includes the instruction "Jet ski across the Pacific Ocean"
- The measurement tool in Google Earth allows users to measure distance in smoots, a unit of length derived from a tradition at MIT.
- Taking the term Easter egg literally (and perhaps to celebrate the Easter holiday), Google has an official Easter Eggs page.
- If one sets the iGoogle theme to the "Beach" option, then at 3:14 AM every morning, the Loch Ness Monster surfaces for 1 minute, then at 3:15 dives back under. The reason for the timing of 3:14 is rumoured to be a tribute to the number pi. Additional 3:14 eggs include the "Seasonal Scape" showing off the Northern Lights, the "City Scape" with UFOs, the "Spring Scape" with a monster, and the "Tea House" that has spirits in the mist.
- On Google Earth, tapping out ctrl-alt-A will activate a hidden flight simulator. (This is now an official feature.)
- Going on Google Street View, and heading to the rear of the company's Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View, California, the Google Street View's production team can be seen.
- In Chrome, Google's Web Browser, entering "about:internets" into the address bar brings up a copy of the Windows Screen Saver 3D Pipes, with the title "Don't Clog the Tubes". In the event that this does not occur due to the fact that the screensaver file does not exist in the system, the browser will instead display a gray screen with the title "The Tubes are Clogged!" This has been removed as of the 2.0.169.1 release.
- The Google Gear's Firefox add-on description line reads "These are the gears that power the tubes! :-)"
- In Google's iPhone and iPod touch search application, swiping downwards (past About) repeatedly in the 'Settings' interface brings up a hidden menu item, called Bells and Whistles, allowing customization of colors, sounds and more within the app. This is now standard on the newest update.
- Entering the term "table" into Google Translate for Spanish to English will return "Is there a striptease bar in the town?" as a definition.
- On the Suggest a feature page for Gmail, it shows "Have Gmail do the laundry" as a suggestion
- Searching "ascii art" will turn the Google logo into ASCII art.
- For a few days in November 2009, visitors to google.com were greeted with nothing but the Google logo and a message stating "This page has been deliberately left blank" On movement of the mouse the page returns to normal.
- In December 2009, Google added an easter egg on their homepage whereby clicking the "I'm Feeling Lucky" box with no text entered brings up a clock counting down the seconds until 2010. When it reached zero it displayed "Happy New Year" in fireworks.
- In December 2009 when typing in a search term including the word "Christmas" the line separating the sponsored links from the normal search is replaced with Christmas lights. Also, when typing in a search term including the word "Hanukkah" the line separating the sponsored links is replaced with a Dreidel design.
- If you ever wondered all the misspellings of Britney Spears and their volume, you must check this out. http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html
- These two links are to fun Google games. The first is on Easter and the second is about Valentines Day. http://www.google.com/Easter/feature_easter.html http://www.google.com/heart/heart01.html
- Everything works on this page, but it seems like the text has been converted to some sort of hacker text. http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/
- The MentalPlex search does not require you to type a query to conduct a search, instead it anticipates your request by evaluating over 1.3 billion variables. http://www.google.com/mentalplex/
- If you are thirsty, you might want to check out the Google Gulp. I hope they come out with this. http://www.google.com/googlegulp/product_line.html
- These are registry files for IE. I would have never expected to see them on Google. http://www.google.com/default.reg http://www.google.com/google_rsearch.reg
- This page is a tribute to Google moms. Can you guess which Googler belongs to which mom? http://www.google.com/moms/
- I think this page has something to do with the "I am feeling lucky" button. http://www.google.com/lucky.html
- This page looks like a search interface for a cell phone or some sort of portable device. http://www.google.com/mozilla/google.xul2
- Google currently does not have an online file backup application that I know about, but this page references it. http://www.google.com/ig/currentcomm/currentlinksmodule.html
- These pages reference customizable Google homepages for partner companies. http://www.google.com/ig/dell http://www.google.com/ig/gateway
- I am not sure what this page is about, but it might have something to do with IE. http://www.google.com/ie_rsearch.html
- It is interesting to see the number of elements pages usually have. http://code.google.com/webstats/2005-12/pages.html
- This is a custom page for the Amgen Tour of California with live updates. http://www.google.com/tofc/
- This page shows that Google has 3 billion documents indexed that you can search. Their current number of indexed documents is probably a lot larger. http://www.google.com/3.html
- These are Google logos that were made by Google fans. http://www.google.com/intl/en/customlogos.html
- This looks like another page that might be related to IE. http://www.google.com/ie
- It seems like Google has coding contest with a good pay out. http://www.google.com/codejam/
- The Librarian Center is a page that talks about how Google and librarians have the same goal of organizing information in a more useful and universal fashion. http://www.google.com/librariancenter/
- Dream India is a page that discusses Arvind Jain's life, Googler that managers Google R&D team in Bangalore. http://www.google.com/rec/dreamindia/
- Google Copernicus Center is a lunar hosting and research center opening in 2007. http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html
- Google tells you that you can block bots in your robots.txt file. This document shows what Google blocks off. http://www.google.com/robots.txt
- Scott Adams created some doodles of Dilbert and Google. http://www.google.com/dilbert.html
- These 5 links are to topic specific Google search engines. You can search just on Mac, Microsoft or even Linux stuff.
http://www.google.com/linux
http://www.google.com/bsd
http://www.google.com/ig/usgov
http://www.google.com/microsoft
http://www.google.com/mac.html
- Meet some Googlers and check out their profiles. http://www.google.com/jobs/meet.html
No comments:
Post a Comment