Google Mirror

Two ways to reverse a page

The panel is a clay slab with a polished violet face. The first mode is a straight visual flip, where the whole panel is mirrored horizontally and every letter becomes a shape you cannot read. Hold an actual mirror up to your monitor and it turns legible again, which is the party trick people were doing with this in 2007.

The second is subtler. The letters are reversed in order but not in shape, so elgooG stays perfectly readable while making no sense at all. Your brain fights that one much harder than the visual flip.

The typing box

Anything you write appears underneath, reversed, live as you type. Names are the obvious first thing everyone tries. Words that read the same in both directions are the second, and racecar is always the first palindrome anybody thinks of.

With the panel flipped, typing gets properly difficult because your cursor moves the wrong way relative to your hand. That is the moment the whole thing stops being a novelty and becomes genuinely disorienting.

Upside down

Stacks with the mirror. Flipped and inverted together rotates the panel a full 180 degrees, at which point the reflection underneath the logo suddenly makes more sense than the logo itself.

Why elgooG

It is just the name spelled backwards, and it became the shorthand for every reversed clone that has existed since. Searches still come in as google search mirror and google mirror both, usually from people who saw it once and could not remember what it was called.

Other ways to break the layout

If reversing is not enough, barrel roll google rotates it instead, and askew google leaves it permanently crooked at a slight angle. google gravity is the one that stops holding the layout together entirely.

For a look at the interface as it actually was rather than as a joke, old google rebuilds the 1998 homepage. The whole set is on the google easter eggs page.

Does the mirror version still work in a real search bar?

No. Mirrored clones were always outside builds rather than official features, which is why they moved to standalone pages years ago. The reversing here happens in your browser, so nothing needs to be typed anywhere else.