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154 points by dkpk · 66 comments

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red_admiral

I'm happy that there are still a few people at google doing the kind of fun things they used to do back when it was a startup.

I think the easter eggs are still up if you ask Google Maps for a walking route to Mordor.

  • hugs

    I'm still sad they removed the Google Maps directions from Boston to London. (At one point, one step was "Swim across the Atlantic Ocean") Now the official answer is 'Sorry, we could not calculate walking directions from "Boston, Massachusetts" to "London, United Kingdom"'

    • yencabulator

      That must have been some sort of a workaround or counterjoke for the actual impossible water crossings Google Maps used to offer. It used to tell me to switch ferries in the middle of the sea!

  • vineyardmike

    While this one seems pretty straight forward to add, it's pretty incredible that they have so many great easter eggs. I can totally imagine that a major site like the SERP changing all the time, and maintaining an easter egg can be a helluva bit of tech debt to drag around without increasing profit. Anyways, kudos to that 1 or 2 engineers who convinced a PM to let them have fun for a few sprints.

  • luciusdomitius

    In my case it found some metal music bar with that name :/

DrBazza

Oh no. https://www.google.com/search?q=comic+sans

OhMeadhbh

It might work with (m)any font hosted by fonts.google.com.

For instance: https://www.google.com/search?q=permanent+marker+font

ChrisArchitect

Nice easter egg, any others?

https://www.google.com/search?q=courier+font

growt

I really like the search results in monospace. I wish you could configure the font!

relistan

Would switch permanently

amelius

How long until they use an LLM to make up a joke based on what the user typed in the query field?

dark-star

I love these hidden eastereggs.

Others I know:

- askew - zeg rush (doesn't seem to work anymore) - ...

Is there a list of all of them?

UI_at_80x24

I had to load this in Edge to actually see the joke. My FireFox config (Ublock/NoScript/?) prevents the custom styles from showing.

lawgimenez

Tried wingdings font, would look fun

trizoza

Brilliant!

  • amelius

    Well, it looks like some programmer forgot to properly escape the query or something.

alams

There are 1000 things google can spend their time on, that will be useful for the users. These intelligent idiots wasting the time and effort on these things.

  • RockRobotRock

    This is one engineer taking an hour out of their day and having a laugh.

  • nurettin

    Absolutely, there are 1000 more memes they can do and they waste time working on ad networks.

  • Thoreandan

    Q: "...Why did you decide to put this easter egg in? Are there more things like this, or is Motif to be blamed for the general bloat in Netscape?"

    A: "Yes, there are a bunch of easter eggs in Mozilla; so? By and large they're pretty small, but that doesn't really matter, because they serve a very important purpose: first, they're entertaining to find (I love it when I stumble across them in other programs, and judging by the amount of mail I get about these things, so do a lot of other people.) Programs should be fun to use. But by far their most important reason for existing is that they are fun to write. Hackers get a kick out of puzzles, and you know what? If dropping in an easter egg allows a hacker to blow off some steam and consequently stick around the office for a few hours longer, and put in a 20 hour day instead of merely a 16 hour day, then those are resources well spent. The hacker's happy at having been creative; somewhere down the road, some users will be amused by it; and the program ships faster, and is a better program because the people who wrote it cared about it. Everybody wins.

    Yes, such toys are "unprofessional." I wear my unprofessionalism as a badge of honor. Professionalism has no place in art, and hacking is art. Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

    Convenient though it would be if it were true, Mozilla is not big because it's full of useless crap. Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful. If that's what you need, you've got options...

    Sure, Mozilla could be leaner, and still do all the things it does today; and that's a noble goal (and, need it even be said, one that you can finally help out with if that is your concern!) But being a shining jewel of perfection was not a goal when we wrote Mozilla. It was not interesting to spent years designing and a decade implementing. The goal was to ship useful software, and to ship it quickly. Along the way we happened to come up with what is probably the most portable piece of software of its size that has ever existed, and what is reportedly also the second most widely used piece of software in the world (after Windows itself.)

    I think that's not too shabby an accomplishment, and if part of the price was a bit of bloat, oh well. Nothing comes for free."

    https://www.jwz.org/doc/easter-eggs.html

  • ecjhdnc2025

    This surely comes out of the marketing budget, though.

  • amelius

    They're not only wasting their own time, unfortunately.

  • dark-star

    IIRC, they get Fridays off to work on exactly such things (or other things they want to do/try).

  • riiii

    There, there.

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