[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.