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Google Search: Roboto Mono (google.com)
154 points by dkpk on July 25, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 61 comments


I'm happy that there are still a few people at google doing the kind of fun things they used to do back when it was a startup.

I think the easter eggs are still up if you ask Google Maps for a walking route to Mordor.


I'm still sad they removed the Google Maps directions from Boston to London. (At one point, one step was "Swim across the Atlantic Ocean") Now the official answer is 'Sorry, we could not calculate walking directions from "Boston, Massachusetts" to "London, United Kingdom"'


That must have been some sort of a workaround or counterjoke for the actual impossible water crossings Google Maps used to offer. It used to tell me to switch ferries in the middle of the sea!


While this one seems pretty straight forward to add, it's pretty incredible that they have so many great easter eggs. I can totally imagine that a major site like the SERP changing all the time, and maintaining an easter egg can be a helluva bit of tech debt to drag around without increasing profit. Anyways, kudos to that 1 or 2 engineers who convinced a PM to let them have fun for a few sprints.


Google can signal that they’re turning around by incorporating more and more Easter eggs into things.


Dream bigger.


In my case it found some metal music bar with that name :/



My favorite result from that search: https://comicsanscriminal.com/


I’m guilty - all do my annotated screenshots for tickets use comic sans


The results are still garbage



It might work with (m)any font hosted by fonts.google.com.

For instance: https://www.google.com/search?q=permanent+marker+font


Yep I first noticed this a month ago with OpenSans https://www.google.com/search?q=opensans


Looks like it doesn't work for Libre Barcode :(

https://www.google.com/search?q=libre+barcode+39+font





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

I've tried some of the mentioned easter eggs and they don't seem to work anymore.


oops, thanks for the warning, I didn't actually check any from that page, just remembered that it existed :(

yep, some do need to be marked discontinued, like "baby yoda"

some do work here but I'm on Chrome without too much JS blocked: "Cha Cha Slide," "blink tag," "askew," "drop bear."




https://www.google.com/search?q=minecraft (click the block that shows up)



Comic sans, times new roman, garamond.


`Comic Sans font` works too.


I'm a bit disappointed that Go Mono (and the other Go fonts, https://go.dev/blog/go-fonts) aren't supported...


I really like the search results in monospace. I wish you could configure the font!


The implementation is literally just one style on the page:

* { font-family: monospace !important }

You can use e.g. Tampermonkey to inject this style on https://www.google.com/search*:

https://www.tampermonkey.net/documentation.php?locale=en#met...


For just injecting CSS I prefer the Stylus addon.


I use uBlock origin for that.


Thanks. I would've never thought about it. For a few fixes I need, installing a new extension would be an overkill.


It can also remove tracking parameters from URLs (no clearurls addon needed) and remove spam from Google and duckduxkgo results via https://github.com/quenhus/uBlock-Origin-dev-filter (no ublocklist needed)


How do you use uBlock to inject CSS?


`example.com##h1:style(background-color: blue !important)`

See https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#... for the syntax.


Doesn’t work on mobile (safari) though :(


I do wish monospace designs were at least a _little_ trendier. My blog uses one, but honestly I feel like I should change it up since I'm looking for roles right now and I worry it doesn't _delight_ like modern designs right now.


It's nice. Extremely fast too.

Personally I had to turn my brightness up to read it easily, so possibly a little more contrast between text and background but that's just me.


Thank you! It’s the Solarized color scheme which is definitely a bit low-contrast. I probably don’t notice it only because I’ve been using the color scheme across apps for so long.


I mean, I’m sure there’s plenty of extensions that let you customise the CSS per site. Treat yourself!


Would switch permanently


How long until they use an LLM to make up a joke based on what the user typed in the query field?


I love these hidden eastereggs.

Others I know:

- askew - zeg rush (doesn't seem to work anymore) - ...

Is there a list of all of them?


A few more I know are "minecraft", "do a barrel roll", and "recursion"


Zerg rush works. Even your typoed version works for me.


ah oops didn't notice the typo. But still, it doesn't work for me for some reason.

I just get the regular search page.

https://imgur.com/a/2lXvSVW


Click the top "result".


yeah I know what it looks like, but that search result is a 3rd party site that cloned the easter egg. The easter egg itself doesn't seem to work on Google anymore


I had to load this in Edge to actually see the joke. My FireFox config (Ublock/NoScript/?) prevents the custom styles from showing.


Tried wingdings font, would look fun


Brilliant!


Well, it looks like some programmer forgot to properly escape the query or something.


There are 1000 things google can spend their time on, that will be useful for the users. These intelligent idiots wasting the time and effort on these things.


This is one engineer taking an hour out of their day and having a laugh.


Absolutely, there are 1000 more memes they can do and they waste time working on ad networks.


Q: "...Why did you decide to put this easter egg in? Are there more things like this, or is Motif to be blamed for the general bloat in Netscape?"

A: "Yes, there are a bunch of easter eggs in Mozilla; so? By and large they're pretty small, but that doesn't really matter, because they serve a very important purpose: first, they're entertaining to find (I love it when I stumble across them in other programs, and judging by the amount of mail I get about these things, so do a lot of other people.) Programs should be fun to use. But by far their most important reason for existing is that they are fun to write. Hackers get a kick out of puzzles, and you know what? If dropping in an easter egg allows a hacker to blow off some steam and consequently stick around the office for a few hours longer, and put in a 20 hour day instead of merely a 16 hour day, then those are resources well spent. The hacker's happy at having been creative; somewhere down the road, some users will be amused by it; and the program ships faster, and is a better program because the people who wrote it cared about it. Everybody wins.

Yes, such toys are "unprofessional." I wear my unprofessionalism as a badge of honor. Professionalism has no place in art, and hacking is art. Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

Convenient though it would be if it were true, Mozilla is not big because it's full of useless crap. Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful. If that's what you need, you've got options...

Sure, Mozilla could be leaner, and still do all the things it does today; and that's a noble goal (and, need it even be said, one that you can finally help out with if that is your concern!) But being a shining jewel of perfection was not a goal when we wrote Mozilla. It was not interesting to spent years designing and a decade implementing. The goal was to ship useful software, and to ship it quickly. Along the way we happened to come up with what is probably the most portable piece of software of its size that has ever existed, and what is reportedly also the second most widely used piece of software in the world (after Windows itself.)

I think that's not too shabby an accomplishment, and if part of the price was a bit of bloat, oh well. Nothing comes for free."

https://www.jwz.org/doc/easter-eggs.html


This surely comes out of the marketing budget, though.


They're not only wasting their own time, unfortunately.


IIRC, they get Fridays off to work on exactly such things (or other things they want to do/try).


Not really anymore, unfortunately.


There, there.




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