Google Easter Eggs; Just Search “Do a Barrel Roll”
This Google Easter Egg is actually a reference to the Nintendo game, "Starfox", in which your Rabbit wingman Peppy tells you to "do a Barrel Roll" to evade enemy missiles. Perhaps there are more computer game related Easter eggs hidden in Google's algorithm?
Hot on the heels of the popularity around Siri Easter Eggs, Google looks like it is taking a leaf out of Wolfram Alpha’s book and bringing some personality quirks to the search engine.
Type the phrase “do a barrel roll” (without quotes) into the search box, and if you are using Chrome, you, um, get what you asked for. Unfortunately is does not work on Firefox, IE or Safari.
Update: Just to confirm that it does now work in Firefox (didn’t at time of writing) and it also definitely works in Safari on iPhone. Apparently it works in Safari 5.1 (OSX 10.7) but we have not been able to recreate that.
Can you find any others? We have tried “do a backflip” and “do a handstand” to no avail.
Update: This Google Easter Egg is actually a reference to the Nintendo game, “Starfox”, in which your Rabbit wingman Peppy tells you to “do a Barrel Roll” to evade enemy missiles. Perhaps there are more computer game related Easter eggs hidden in Google’s algorithm?
SEW reader, Mark, also spotted this Google Easter Egg. Just search “askew” or “tilt” (without quotes) to get a wonky search interface.
This article was originally published in Search Engine Watch on 3rd November, 2011.