Google features a lot of jokes and fun little secrets, collectively known as Easter eggs, around its products. While you might be familiar with Easter eggs in video games, they’re also present in software and other tech sources.
These Google Search Easter eggs don’t have any practical use, but they’ll make you chuckle when you search for something that brings up a goofy result. Try entering these into Google and seeing the fun for yourself.
The Did you mean line appears on the results page when your search has a typo or Google thinks you meant to look up something similar. Some of the best Google Search Easter eggs take advantage of this.
When you search “Alex Trebek”, the Did you mean suggestion asks if you meant “Who is Alex Trebek”. This is a reference to his longtime hosting of the game show Jeopardy, where all contestant answers must be in the form of a question, starting with “who is”, to be accepted.
Searching Google for “steamed hams” will result in it asking if you meant “steamed clams“. If you’re a fan of The Simpsons or internet humor in general, you’ll recognize this.
It references a short scene where Skinner’s plans to have his boss over for lunch are ruined when he burns the roast. He lies that the smoke in the oven is actually steam from the “steamed clams” he’s preparing, then heads to a nearby fast food place and tries to pass their burgers off as his own cooking. When he’s questioned about this, he clarifies he said “steamed hams”, which he claims are what he called hamburgers where he grew up.
While this episode aired in 1996, it became major meme fodder in the late 2010s, when “Steamed hams but…” videos started parodying it in every conceivable way.
If you’ve been to a wedding lately, you’ll know where this one is going. The Cha Cha Slide is a line dancing song, first released in 2000, that has become a staple at wedding receptions.
Googling it lets you dance along at home, thanks to the icons to the left of the song name. As you click them, you’ll hear the instructions like “to the left” and “one hop this time!”
Continuing with the pop culture references, Google also has an amusing reference for fans of The Office. Searching “assistant regional manager” will result in Google asking if you meant “assistant to the regional manager”.
This is a running joke early in the series, where Dwight calls himself “assistant regional manager” but Michael continually corrects this to the lesser “assistant to the regional manager”. Even Google’s AI overview seems in on the joke, though this is likely because the overview is getting its information on this term primarily from content about The Office.
I’ve mostly chosen Easter eggs that were new to me, but this is a long-running one I’ve enjoyed for a while. Searching for “recursion” brings up a Did you mean prompt for the same word, which might lead you to think you spelled it wrong the first time. But each time you click it, the page refreshes, which is the joke.
Recursion is when a process depends on a prior version of itself, like when a programming function calls itself or the “infinity mirror” effect when you share your screen on a video call and create dozens of smaller copies of it.
If you like this one, try “Groundhog Day” (one of those movies you can watch over and over, if you will) and see what happens!
The One Ring is the central object of the Lord of the Rings series, and has an Easter egg for anyone searching for more info about it on Google. A search for it will ask if you instead meant “my Precioussss”, which is how the character Gollum refers to the ring after being corrupted by it and becoming obsessed with it.
It’s one of the most famous lines from an excellent series of movies, so it’s well-deserving of this amusing suggestion from Google.
If you were online during the internet’s early days, you’ll remember many webpages with ugly fonts, scrolling text, and other near-unreadable issues. Searching for “blink tag” lets you relive one of these: the deprecated HTML tag that flashes text.
Text disappearing and reappearing is annoying and doesn’t work well with accessibility tools, so we quickly moved on, thankfully. But it’s fun to relive those early days in this small way.
I didn’t realize this until recently: when you search for a font by name, Google displays its results page in that font. Not all are supported, but many common ones are. While this is a fun discovery, it can also be practical (unlike most of these).
If you’re not sure what a font looks like, or want to see it in use without fumbling around in a document of your own, this lets you easily preview it. Another fun one related to this: searching “best font ever” brings up Comic Sans, the internet’s “favorite” font.
Ever feel the desire to see what websites looked like in the past? You don’t need any special tools to do this for Google. Search “google in 1998” and you’ll be treated to a recreation of what the service looked like the year it launched.
It comes complete with the exclamation point in Google’s early logo, the option to change how many results appear, and links to try your query on other long-gone search tools like AltaVista and Infoseek.
Everyone around my age will remember growing up with DVDs. While their often-unique menus bring a lot of nostalgia, nothing evokes that as much as the classic screensaver. Google lets you relive this by searching “DVD screensaver”.
Wait a moment and you’ll see the logo fly around the screen in that predictable pattern. Every time the logo hits an edge, it changes color. And of course, the big moment comes when the logo hits a corner. A small pleasure, but one that brings back simpler times for many of us.
If you love this bit of nostalgia, the Bouncing DVD Logo site lets you put one up on the screen for as long as you like.
