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.

I feel the same way when I see Northrop Gruman, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, JPMorganChase and Goldman Sachs celebrating Pride Month!

You think gay people don't like money or that big banks work against the interest of gay people ?

I'll tell you a secret, in big corporations, gay people are many, don't hide and are sometimes in power. They celebrate pride months because they care, they're the bosses :D

And it's perfectly fine :D Sexual minorities are often oppressed by traditionalists and uneducated people, and a coke addict stock trader is quite the opposite of that.

Seriously? These corporations' PR stunts make you happy?

I'll be the cynical one this time and say that I'd rather carefully calculated PR stunts didnt have an affect of making corporations seem more fun and human. Sociopaths wear all kinds of convincing masks

As a google employee I’m glad the culture of doing fun things perseveres from the early days, despite our massive growth.

I have to say that I'm impressed that at the scale of google they have the ability, and the desire, to approve and turn around small fun things like this so quickly.

I assume there must still be a fairly deep process to get approval to do something like this, but, one which must be hyper-efficient and streamlined. If google took even 24 or 48 hours to approve a change like this the moment would be gone.

I'm very curious if you know, and could share, anything about what that process looks like? Is it actually a formal process or are people just encouraged to bring up off-the-wall ideas to senior leadership who are empowered to approve things like this?

I don’t know the specifics but my guess is that the team responsible for search front end has people who are responsible for Easter eggs. Someone, maybe from that team, would have filed a launch ticket for that specific feature, and quickly obtained approvals from privacy, legal, and product management people. Then some engineer and designer probably volunteered themselves to do the work, and did it. Generally launch approvals are fairly streamlined, and only get bogged down when the thing being launched has complex privacy, security, or legal considerations. In this case I’d imagine those issues are almost nonexistent so that’s why it could happen so quickly.

> No means no in this context as well.

No, you have no right to demand that so it does not.

In all reasonable jurisdictions I have the right to server logs and to share those as I feel reasonable. Protect your own privacy, don't intrude on my right to journal.

No fun allowed

I will pray for your soul.

Whatever cynicism, it doesn’t take away that this is just a fun thing to do.

I wonder if maybe Google employs humans that like things that are fun?

It is both things of course, to different people.

It is something fun to do for the coders who implemented the animated ships, and most of the people who see them.

Likewise, it is a calculated PR stunt by the executives who approved the release.

Or even better: a calculated decision to create a culture where people who are not executives can approve a release that ultimately functions as a PR stunt, without requiring everyone involved to necessarily see it that way. It scales much better

Every last one of us is a potential bad actor. This is why the enlightened self interest metric was such a big deal to introduce and why we have myriad traditions for trying to curb our tendencies, such as the Christian idea of "Lead me not into temptation."

Finding systems to plug individuals into that have some hope of doing good for both them and others is our only hope of making a world with nearly 8 billion people function at all sanely.

I have a difficult time believing this didn't go through multiple layers of review.

I bet it did (as any change to production); whether that had to involve "executives" that's another story.

> 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

but let me ask, in this day and age, on google.com, the most visited website on the planet and the most venerable of all Google's properties (it is the face of their trillion(?) dollar company)...

...do we really think this was a fun little easter egg from a software engineer having some fun over lunch?

I imagine that could have been the case in the mid 2000's.

But the front page of google? surely there were meetings over this, multiple reviews, lawyers, etc? Or am I just too cynical?

I worked on the front page at google around 10 years ago. It was all those things you describe back then too. And at least then there were not multiple reviews/meetings or lawyers involved in releasing something like this. If it's still the same then this probably started as a lunch time conversation and was implemented before lunch the next day.

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.

I wonder how much maintenance and testing these things add. Sure it would be trivial to get it working now, but they must have to do so many checks to see its not breaking on other browsers and then that it doesn't cause issues in the future.

Haha, are you kidding me? Using firefox try cilcking pause button in bottom left on youtube, then hitting space to play it (event is handled twice, video will only play fraction of second). It's been like that for .. 5 years +? With google photos / gmail / hangouts it's like Google is trying to actively discourage you from using anything other than Chrome by giving you just enough bugs to make you really annoyed but avoid being labeled as completely broken.

They should have it all working flawlessly at their scale, given amount of data they can collect and amount of communication they are providing about the issues.

I'm stopping before going further because I don't want to do the standard google keyword present let's do some bitching, but I wish Google put could 1/5 of the effort they are putting into making their core infrastructure rock solid on user experience in their products. Despite providing ff as an example it's not like having no issues when you run everything Google.

> They should have it all working flawlessly at their scale

Insufficient economic incentives.

Firefox is ~4% of the installed base for web browsers (as per externally-visible metrics). The priority for bug fixing is going to look something like Chrome -> Chrome (mobile devices) -> Safari -> Safari (mobile devices) -> Edge -> Firefox.

... additionally, if the same behavior works correctly in Chrome, Safari, and Edge, it unfortunately indicates it's more likely to be a standards-noncompliance bug on Mozilla's side than an error in the YouTube implementation.

EDIT: Specifically, it might be this bug. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1487102

In this case, it's a div full of ship emojis separated by   and a css animation, so no javascript.

You can change the speed in the js console...

$('div.resultMarquee').style.animationDuration='120s';

The element is placed on the page with a `DOMContentLoaded` callback.

I have to admit, until today I thought Geocities is a Yahoo Japan only thing..

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

Also 'askew'

'define anagram' or 'do a barrel roll'

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).

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;

&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</div></div></div>

I had to put some newlines in your nbsps because the post was borking the page layout. Sorry; it's our bug.

Whoops, my bad. From the downvotes, I guess HN doesn't find it amusing that Google is using a pre-CSS era, 1999 technique to space the ships apart.

From the HN Guidelines, visible at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and linked from the bottom of each page:

> What to Submit

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

[...]

> In Comments

[...]

> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did."

Barely bandwidth wasting since they're using the official ship emoji vs shipping an image.

To be specific, the entire `<div id="easter-egg">...</div>` that this is contained in adds an additional 158 bytes to the compressed response.