Google Easter Eggs

Twenty five things hiding behind a search box

Every card in the grid is a clay tile from the same purple and white set, so the index reads as one shelf of models rather than 25 unrelated pages. Some of these were official one day doodles. Some were built by people outside the company and got adopted by the lucky button. A handful were quietly retired years ago and only exist now because somebody rebuilt them. They all share one quality, which is that nobody ever went looking for them on purpose the first time.

Use the filter chips if you already know what mood you are in. Playable means there is a fail state and a score. Physics tricks means something moves when you push it. Just to look at means you can leave it running while you do something else.

Start here if you have never seen any of them

do a barrel roll takes four seconds and is the one everyone recognises. google gravity is the one that made people forward links to their colleagues in 2009. zerg rush is the one that will actually make you swear at your screen.

After that it depends. Musical people go to google guitar and stay far longer than they meant to. People who like watching things break end up on thanos snap or google black hole.

The retired ones

Several triggers no longer fire in a live search bar. That includes the zerg swarm, the 1998 homepage and the snowfall, all of which had a good run and then quietly stopped. The versions here are rebuilds, not archives, which means they work on a phone and do not need a specific browser from a decade ago.

Worth knowing before you click around

A few of these are noisy. google guitar obviously, and the underwater one has bubbling. Nothing autoplays sound without you interacting first, so you are safe opening several tabs at once.

Most also run fine on mobile, though the ones built around a cursor position are better with a mouse. batman easter egg google and google matrix are the two examples of that.

Seasonal picks

let it snow google gets busy in December for obvious reasons. google underwater and google fan both spike in summer, one because people want water and the other because people want wind. 1998 google peaks every September around the company’s founding date.

How the picker works

It clears whatever filter you have set, then highlights one card at random with a violet ring and scrolls it into view. Press it again and it picks another. It will never send you back to this index page, which would be a waste of a click.