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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadSo 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.
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.
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).
* "ascii art", "what is the answer to life the universe and everything", "tilt", etc.
However, equally nerd-heart-warming :)
(Look at the logo.)
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; }
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!
Type in "this is" and it finishes with "why you are fat".
http://www.google.com/search?q=tilt
search for "askew" does the same thing as "tilt"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLp7LXTSrfs
drats it didn't work
http://i.imgur.com/Og9Jo.png
There was a discussion on this exact subject recently on Reddit (/r/askscience) which might be interesting:
http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/m2b1t/how_fast_c...
and the entry on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_force
https://gist.github.com/1337458