Do a barrel roll

One rotation is the whole trick

The search panel is a clay tile set in a white cockpit frame. Press the first button and it turns a full 360 degrees while the horizon behind it rolls the opposite way. Under a second, then everything is upright again as if nothing happened. That is the original, and it is still the version most people want.

The horizon counter rotating at a different rate from the panel is what makes it read as a roll rather than a spin. Watch the brown half of the sky come over the top.

Then people started asking for more

Twice. Five times. Twenty. A hundred. The search history for this thing is a long list of increasingly unreasonable numbers, and every one of those buttons is here because somebody typed it into a search bar and meant it.

The rate slider matters more than the count once you get past ten. At the default speed a hundred rolls takes a while, and cranking the rate to maximum turns the panel into a blur that is genuinely hard to look at for long.

The absurd ones

Ten thousand and 99999 both work exactly as advertised, they just take as long as they take. The endless option removes the target entirely and keeps going until you press stop, which is the honest version of what people mean when they type a number with twenty digits in it.

Stopping does not leave the panel at a random angle either. It snaps to the nearest whole rotation, so the layout always ends up level.

Three counters, three different jobs

Rolls done tracks the current run. Target shows what you asked for. Lifetime keeps adding up across every run in this session and never resets, so if you have been mashing buttons for a while it will tell you exactly how much of your day went into do a barrel roll.

The name

It comes from Star Fox 64 and a bird called Peppy telling you to do it constantly, which is why the phrase lodged in an entire generation’s memory. The trick appeared in 2011 and has been the most recognisable item in the whole collection ever since. Variations like z or r twice, do the barrel roll and google barrel roll all point at the same rotation.

If spinning is your thing

google tilt is the calmer relative, tipping the page a few degrees and leaving it there. google gravity knocks it over completely. google mirror flips it rather than rotating it.

The full list of tricks is on the google easter eggs page, including zerg rush google if you want something that fights back.