Google showing animated ships when searching “ever given” (opens in new tab)

Whatever our criticisms of Google, it's part of our internet culture in sometimes weird and wonderful ways. This seems kind of like a little happy dance for the world after so much hand wringing and legitimate worry.

> Easter eggs can be a way for software engineers and designers to put a bit of their own personality into the product through humor and wit. They're a way of saying, 'I made this and I love it.' Their hidden nature means that those who discover them are likely to be people who spend a lot of time using the product.

> This act of discovery is great for building an emotional connection between the people who create software products and the people who use them. Finding an Easter egg is a great experience — like finding buried treasure — and sharing that experience can be fun, too. It's a little gift for true fans that goes a long way towards making people feel like they're part of the club.

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-gb/advertising-chann...

Wikipedia has a massive list of Google's Easter eggs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_Easter_eggs

Looks like it’s desktop only. On mobile I had to toggle on ‘Request desktop site’ to see the ships scrolling across the top of the search results.

Cute Easter egg lol

It's got a real Geocities marquee vibe to it, as all Easter eggs should.

Other fun things to search: emacs, vi, recursion.

Makes me wonder if anyone suggested Ever Given "do a barrel roll"[1]

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=do+a+barrel+roll

These ships also trigger for "did you mean" searches. So, for example, search for "ever givne" or "ever gaven". Google's engine will start "Showing results for ever given". That must mean that the ships are applied after the query is resolved. Clicking "Search instead for ever givne" will take you to the original query's result set which will no longer contain ships.

If you guys enjoy easter eggs, you might like to know about the easter egg subreddit. https://old.reddit.com/r/eastereggs

Full disclosure: I own/run it. Sorry if there are posts about Easter. Our automod config works pretty well but some posts leak through this time of year ;)

The home page of Google still gives you the option to 'Search' or 'I'm feeling Lucky' even in 2021.

It's just sliding squares in Chrome, but ironically it works in FF. I must be missing a font that FF provides?

On the first sight I fired up Developer Tools to check the banner is *not* <marquee>.

Looks like it only work on desktop. (“Request desktop site” in Chrome mobile works).

Google still has a soul!

Source code (HN removed the emojis)

  <div class="LHJvCe"><div id="result-stats"><div class="resultMarquee">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

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why is this on HN frontpage?

EDIT - I only mean to say that Google showing this animation is mildly interesting, but there other are far more interesting stories.

Gee I’m glad to see their real issue backlog is now empty so they have time to do this kind of bandwidth-wasting, cycle-sucking garbage.

Yeah these things no longer cover up the fact that they try to turn you into a serial killer on youtube or that your search results are mostly useless ads