Google's Tilted Easter Egg

If you search for [tilt], [tilted] or [askew] on a smartphone using Google, you might notice a strange special effect: Google's search results page is tilted to the right. It's an Easter Egg, just like the "did you mean" link displayed when you search for [recursion].


{ via Search Engine Land }

Google Translate's Beatbox Easter Egg

Last month, a Reddit user found an unexpected way to use Google Translate: as a beatbox.

1) Go to Google Translate
2) Set the translator to translate German to German
3) Copy + paste the following into the translate box: pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz zk pv pv pv zk pv zk zk pzk pzk pvzkpkzvpvzk kkkkkk bsch
4) Click "listen"
5) Be amazed :)

You could also use this permalink, but it's less exciting. There are many other variations you could try.

Google decided to make it more obvious that this is an Easter egg by replacing "Listen" with "Beatbox".


Here's a YouTube video featured in Google Demo Slam:

{ Thanks, Zachary. }

Easter Egg in Google Books Ngram Viewer

Rickrolling seems to be Google's favorite prank. If you try to search for [never gonna give you up] in Google's recently launched Ngram viewer, you'll have a pleasant surprise: a YouTube video of Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up".

Never gonna give you up,
Never gonna let you down
Never gonna run around and desert you
Never gonna make you cry,
Never gonna say goodbye
Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you...

{ Thanks, Federico. }

Play Snake in YouTube's Player

YouTube's player has a clever Easter egg: make sure the player has focus (try pausing and resuming the video), hold the left key for about 2 seconds and press the up key, while still holding the left key. You can now play Snake while watching the video.



This trick only works in YouTube's new player, which is only available for videos that don't include annotations or ads. It's limited to the videos played on YouTube's site and it doesn't work for embedded videos. Here's an example of video you can use to play Snake.

YouTube is not the only Google product that lets you play games. Gmail has a Labs feature called "old Snakey" that adds a Snake game inside Gmail.

{ via TheNextWeb. Thanks, Kevin. }

Google's Anagram Easter Egg

Search for [anagram] using Google and you'll notice a weird suggestion: "Did you mean: nag a ram". Obviously, "nag a ram" is an anagram of the word "anagram".

"An anagram is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce a new word or phrase, using all the original letters exactly once," according to Wikipedia.

Google can't find the anagrams of a word, but you can use WolframAlpha to find them.


This is not the first Google Easter egg that helps you understand a query: [ASCII art] and [recursion] are two other examples.

{ Thanks, Arpit. }

Google ASCII Art

If you Google [ascii art], you'll find an ASCII representation of Google's logo next to the search box. It's a geeky Easter egg closely related to the witty use of the "did you mean" feature to help you understand recursion.


{ via Marissa Mayer }

Google Helps You Understand Recursion

Google uses the "did you mean" feature, which normally corrects misspellings, to illustrate a nerdy joke: defining the word "recursion" using "see recursion" and pointing to the same definition.


"A recursive process is one in which objects are defined in terms of other objects of the same type. Using some sort of recurrence relation, the entire class of objects can then be built up from a few initial values and a small number of rules," explains MathWorld.

For more information, search Google for [recursion].

{ via Google Blogoscoped }

Chat With a Martian in Google Earth 5

Open the latest version of Google Earth, switch to "Mars" and search for "Meliza". Click on the small robotic icon and you'll be able to chat with Meliza, a friendly relative of Eliza, one of the first chat bots. A message informs Earthlings that "Meliza is using an account on a different planet. There may be translation errors." The chat bot has some predefined text related to Mars and it can't answer to many questions, but it's always ready to rephrase your messages.

Here's Meliza's first message: "Greetings, Earthling! What do you think of Google Mars?Have you checked out Valles Marineris? It's like the Grand Canyon, but bigger. Mars is so much better than Earth!"


In other news, Google and NASA sponsor Singularity University. "In 2005, futurist Ray Kurzweil published The Singularity Is Near, a comfort-rattling forecast of a few decades hence when artificial intelligence will overtake human capability and an array of other huge leaps will fundamentally alter our lives. Now, Kurzweil is helping to launch a university rooted in the book's predictions. In June, Singularity University is scheduled to open with a faculty replete with scientific celebrities, and an initial class of 30 students at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley."

{ Thanks, Tom. }

Google Chrome's about: Pages

Like most other browsers, Google Chrome has some special pages that show information about memory usage, cached files, plug-ins and more. Here's a list of the most interesting about: pages available in Google Chrome (you can open them by dragging about:name to the address bar).

1. about:version - Google Chrome shows the version number the browser, WebKit and V8 (JavaScript engine). You can also find the user-agent used by Google Chrome:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1 Safari/525.19


2. about:plugins - the list of plug-ins that are available in Google Chrome: Shockwave Flash, RealPlayer etc.

3. about:cache - a list of all the web pages cached by Google Chrome. The browser doesn't have an option to limit the cache's size, so it's recommended to regularly empty the cache.

4. about:memory - this pages compares the memory used by all the active browsers and by Google Chrome's tabs.


5. about:stats - a list of internal counters and timers that has a funny subtitle "Shhh! This page is secret!".


6. about:histograms - a list of histograms for Google Chrome's internal metrics.


7. about:dns - Google Chrome prefetches the DNS records for 10 frequently visited hostnames. This feature can be disabled in Options > Under the Hood by unchecking "Use DNS pre-fetching to improve page load performance".

8. about:network - this page could be used for I/O tracking and it's a partial replacement for the Live HTTP Headers extension. Click on "Start I/O tracking", open a web page in a new tab and you'll get a list of all the images, scripts and objects loaded from that web page.

9. about:crash - crash the active tab. Google Chrome displays the "sad tab" image, followed by this message: "Something went wrong while displaying this webpage. To continue, press Reload or go to another page".


10. about:hang - type this in the address bar of a tab when there's already an active web page to hang the process (this means that the process no longer accepts any signal, but it's still running). The other tabs will continue to work and the active tab can be closed.

11. about:internets - this is an Easter egg that references two popular Internet memes: Internets and Series of tubes. Google Chrome embeds the 3D Pipes screensaver from Windows, so you'll see it only if you have the file sspipes.scr in C:\Windows\System32.


{ via Tech-Pro.net and reddit. Thanks, Daniel. }

Google Earth Easter Egg: Flight Simulator

Apparently, the latest version of Google Earth has an easter egg: a flight simulator. It's not quite like Microsoft Flight Simulator, but it's a promising start.

How to see this feature. Make sure you have Google Earth 4.2. Open the application, click on the globe and then press Ctrl+Alt+A. You should see this dialog that lets you choose one of the two aircrafts (F16 "Viper" and SR22) and an airport.


Here's the initial view from London Heathrow Airport:


... and here's a nice view from Kathmandu:



To fly, you need to read this list of keyboard shortcuts, but you can also use a mouse or a joystick. "To disable or enable mouse controls, left click (single click on a Mac). Once mouse controls are active, the pointer shape changes to a cross on your screen."

Marco Gallotta, who found this feature, has some tricks: "Moving on though, you can get a quick start by holding Page Up for a few seconds to increase to maximum thrust (thrust meter is the left bar of the lower-left meters). Once you've accelerated to a sufficient velocity use the arrow keys to take-off. The keys are in reverse as one would expect with any flight simulator, so use the down arrow to take-off. When you've gained enough altitude then stabalise the aircraft to a straight flight path. It can be rather tricky to get the hang of as the controls are quite sensitive."

This easter egg could become a standard feature in the next versions of Google Earth and it will bring even more fun to the application.

Easter Egg in Google Personalized Homepage

There's an easter egg related to the new themes added in Google Personalized Homepage. If you chose any theme other than Bus Stop and Classic, visit the homepage at 3:14 AM (your local time)*.

In the Beach theme there's Nessie, the Loch Ness monster:


And the "Sweet dreams" theme has a nice Pi:


Tea house:


Seasonal scape:


City scape:


For a way to see these easter eggs, check Ben's comment. You'll have to select a theme and inject the content from the CSS file corresponding to your theme:

http://www.google.com/ig/skins/NAME/NAME_3.14am.css

where NAME is in { teahouse, cityscape, beach, sweetdreams, winterscape }

* As you might know, pi=3.14159...