Let It Snow Google Trick

It starts falling before you ask

The scene is built from clay hills and pressed violet pines. Snow is already coming down when the page loads. Two hills, four pines, a dusk gradient behind them, and about a hundred and seventy flakes drifting at different speeds with a slight sideways wobble. The counter in the corner tracks how much has settled, which is entirely made up but strangely satisfying to watch climb.

The frost is the good part

Press frost the glass and a layer of ice builds across the window with crystal branches scratched through it. Then drag your cursor over it. Wherever you pass, the ice is gone and the winter scene shows through, exactly like clearing a car windscreen with your sleeve.

Writing your name in it takes about four seconds and is the reason this page gets sent around in December. That single interaction is what most people remember about the let it snow google trick.

Blizzard

Flake count jumps from 170 to 420, fall speed triples, and the horizontal drift gets wild enough that the trees start disappearing behind the white. Frosting the glass during a blizzard and then clearing a small circle is the best looking combination available here.

Defrost and start over

Defrost strips the ice completely and resets the settled counter to zero. The snow keeps falling unless you stop it separately, which is the arrangement most people want. The stop button freezes every flake exactly where it is, mid air, which looks eerie for a second.

The original trick

Typing let it snow into a search bar used to fog the results page and let you wipe it clear with the mouse, with a defrost button replacing the search button. Variants of the query have been searched ever since, from snow google trick to let it snow google easter egg, usually around the first cold week of the year.

Other seasonal detours

google underwater is the summer equivalent, with waves instead of snow and fish instead of pines. google fan is what you want if the blizzard has put you in mind of wind. And google gravity is the one to open when you are done with weather entirely.

The complete set is on the google easter eggs page.