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Only works in Chrome or Firefox, pretty fun :)
Works in Safari too.
and Midori
and Lynx, but with just 4 frames the animation is a bit choppy
I actually tried this to see if you were serious.
Would this barrel roll effect even be possible with a curses interface browser?
And on the iPhone. Impressive.
Doesn't for me in 5.1.1 (6534.51.22) or the latest WebKit nightly.
Strange, I'm on 5.1.1 (7534.51.22) and it's working here.
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Nah, my Chrome crashes ^^ (Version 15.0.874.106 on 64bit Fedora)
For those who aren’t using a compatible browser: right after the page loads, a screenshot of your view of the page rotates 360° as if in a barrel roll. The page is then a normal, functioning Google results page.
It's not a screenshot, it's the actual page that rotates - you can click the links during the roll.
tilt works on opera but the barrell roll does not.
Note the bug: "do a barrel roll" skyrocketed at the top of the suggestion lists for "do a ".

So if you have Google Instant enabled, just typing "do a " will instant-search "do a barrel roll" and trigger the effect.

I'm sure this wasn't intended.

I wonder if the barrel roll effect was intended for a Google Image search on "do a barrel roll" as well. The effect is much more prominent -- and annoying since you see the effect every time you navigate back. (I hadn't seen the meme, so I was browsing for images on it.)
oh yes and it is completely broken on Google Images, at least on my browser (Chrome): a few elements are misplaced during the animation, and it looks like the center of rotation is not the center of the page.
A barrel roll is an off center roll, so that part is probably intentional.
No, the center is off the page so the images are only on screen at the beginning and the end. It is a different effect from the web search one, or at least appears to be.
Actually, according to a recent Google blog post, this is exactly what should happen for hot trending searches. They tweaked the algorithm to make hot search topics bubble up in the suggestion box and return relevant results for recent news.
Yeah but presumably 'do a barrel roll' is intended as a kind of easter egg that only a select few will discover to their intense joy.
Of course, what I am saying is that as a side-effect the easter egg is triggered even if just "do a " is entered, rather than the full key-query.

That's why it doesn't make sense as an easter egg: "do a " is a frequent prefix, people looking for something else could be annoyed by the effect.

However, autocomplete will fill out the rest of the query for the user to see, so they should get a fair idea if they are paying attention... which they should be when the contents suddenly spins.
Definitely a bug since "ascii art" one doesn't work in instant search.
IMHO, this is not a bug but a feature. "do a barrel roll" is a trending topic today. So it must have been ranked higher in their search suggestions. The first query which is suggested when you say "do a" is "do a barrel roll" which causes the whole page to roll.

Pretty cool - I think we should be appreciative of such efforts rather than cultivating bugs. A standard experience is what Google had offered for years - can you even begin to imagine, what it would have taken for the Product Manager for Google Search to even convince everyone to get this implemented. And this is multiple teams you are talking about here (I am guessing at least 5-6 including engg, QA, monetization, legal, support, branding etc).

Considering the fact that Google has had such easter eggs for years* I don't think getting this one through was that hard.

* "ascii art", "what is the answer to life the universe and everything", "tilt", etc.

I was so delightfully surprised when I went to type it in, expecting something to happen, and it rolled halfway through my query. Awesome!
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Compared to the barrel roll, perhaps less funny and more annoying.

However, equally nerd-heart-warming :)

As far as Easter Eggs go, also: https://www.google.com/search?pws=0&q=recursion
As far as Easter Eggs go, also: https://www.google.com/search?pws=0&q=recursion
As far as Easter Eggs go, also: https://www.google.com/search?pws=0&q=recursion

  File "<stdin>", line 1, in easter_egg
  RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded
That's why you need to do a CPS transform to transform every call into a tail call, and wrap the continuation up on the heap, so you don't blow out the stack.
Wow that just flipped my world around.
Kind of a funny optical allusion, but after looking at that tilted google page for a few minutes and then coming back to HN, it looks like HN is tilted too.
And, type "straighten" to fix it!
Nice, but I wonder how much money Google are losing delivering the animation code for this easteregg with every results page, on the off-chance that someone types this query. I couldn’t find any sign of dynamic code loading in a cursory glance in the web inspector. Google Search’s source code is otherwise ruthlessly optimised for bandwidth savings.
It's done with CSS:

body { -moz-animation-name: roll; -moz-animation-duration: 4s; -moz-animation-iteration-count: 1; -o-animation-name: roll; -o-animation-duration: 4s; -o-animation-iteration-count: 1; -webkit-animation-name: roll; -webkit-animation-duration: 4s; -webkit-animation-iteration-count: 1; }

I didn't know this existed -- CSS3? No javascript at work here? I didn't look at the web resources myself but I'm curious
Whatever money they're losing on this, they're probably regaining in terms of PR (which is much needed after their bad-karma with users lately with reader/gmail), and hence long term revenue.
It's a CSS3 transform. Code to the client is no more than a few bytes.
Not to worry - this code is only included for this query. I can guarantee you this easter egg wouldn't have shipped if it had required supporting code to be present on every query, for the reasons you mentioned.
It's a CSS transition in an inline <style> block. I imagine it's inserted dynamically with the results.

   body {
     ...
     -webkit-animation-name: roll;
     -webkit-animation-duration: 4s;
     -webkit-animation-iteration-count: 1;
   }
And wasn't there just a post about easter eggs being a thing of the past? Thanks Google for adding a little bit of fun to your product!
Happy to find that there's still a little humor left in the corporate world :)

It's probably a good publicity/user-karma boost that this has come out at this timing, right after the recent debacles with Gmail, Google Reader, and the iOS Gmail app. Definitely leaves me feeling warm and fuzzy inside!

I was hoping 'do a loop' did something as well.
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And Google is why you are fat.

Type in "this is" and it finishes with "why you are fat".

This made me choke on my coffee.
No money for labs, but this...
Labs wasn't about money. It was about moving away from half baked unmaintained releases and towards producing products that the company would be willing to support properly.
I read that as "moving away from half baked unanimated releases".
I can do this in 20 minutes, is just a little of CSS3 and an animate function (like the jQuery one)... so not so much money spent on this.
Nice. That's more of an aileron roll, though. A barrel roll has an accompanying corkscrew motion of your velocity vector along with the rotation.
Right, but it's a reference to the game, where Peppy says, "Do a barrel roll", but the actual maneuver that you can perform is a very fast aileron roll.
Funny, I never heard of that game. (Maybe it's because I fly flight simulators where a barrel roll actually is a barrel roll... ;-P )
I'm not sure I would call Star Fox 64 a flight simulator. I would recommend that you play it though :-)
What's the Easter Egg?
In the movie saga "Back to the future" the DeLorean time machine needs to travel at 88 mph and the flux capacitor needs 1.21 gigawatts of power in order to activate the time circuits.
There's still no Easter Egg on Google though - the search results for Back to the Future are there because they refer to those numbers.
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I wouldn't call it an easter egg persay, I just find it funny it actually calculates it
I'm assuming this is being noticed because of the recent ANA plane aerobatics : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aunUFwyxsF0 (spoiler : plane landed safely).
that was centrifugal, not gravitational force
Centripetal. Centrifugal force is imaginary.
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Not working for me; I thought it might be https everwhere or the google https search option, but turning those off didn't produce the effect. Firefox 3.6.23 on Fedora 14.
A modern browser is required. Firefox 7?
Would be a good keyword to advertise on, startups!
Is this Google's response to Siri? :)
Yes, because easter eggs didn't exist before the iPhone 4S.