[jsjabsvsjs]

> 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

[2bitencryption]

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?

[zaphar]

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.