Google Fan

A desk fan the size of the screen

Five blades in five shades of purple behind a wire cage, a white clay neck, an oval base that looks pressed by hand. It fills the frame on purpose, because a small fan in the corner of an empty page is not worth looking at. Every part of this one is big enough to see the shading on the blades as they spin.

Power it on and the rpm counter climbs rather than jumping, and cutting the power lets it coast down over a couple of seconds. That inertia is a small thing that makes the whole object feel physical.

Three speeds and a bad idea

Speed one is a lazy summer turn. Speed two starts pushing enough air to see. Speed three throws letters across the screen sideways, which is the actual reason anyone opens google fan in the first place.

Then there is the crazy button, borrowed in spirit from the lucky one. It pushes the blades well past speed three and starts rocking the whole unit side to side on its base like it is about to walk off the desk. Nothing breaks. It just looks like it might.

Reversing it

Flips the blade direction and sends the wind trails the other way. Combined with crazy mode it produces something that no real fan would survive, and it is worth doing once just to see the trails whip backwards.

The wind is not decoration

The trails and the flying letters are tied directly to the rpm figure. Below about thirty rpm nothing is thrown at all. As the number climbs the particles spawn faster and travel further, so the visual load matches whatever the fan is actually doing at that moment.

Where this sits

The original was a fan made by a developer as a joke about being an admirer of the search page, and the pun has kept it alive ever since. Queries land here as crazy google fan, real google fan, googlefan, goggle fan and a dozen other misspellings, all after the same spinning blades.

If you want more moving air, google snow gives you a blizzard and google underwater gives you a current. For things that move because gravity told them to rather than a motor, google gravity and bouncy google are both worth a minute. The index is at google easter eggs.