[AdamJacobMuller]

I have to say that I'm impressed that at the scale of google they have the ability, and the desire, to approve and turn around small fun things like this so quickly.

I assume there must still be a fairly deep process to get approval to do something like this, but, one which must be hyper-efficient and streamlined. If google took even 24 or 48 hours to approve a change like this the moment would be gone.

I'm very curious if you know, and could share, anything about what that process looks like? Is it actually a formal process or are people just encouraged to bring up off-the-wall ideas to senior leadership who are empowered to approve things like this?

[enneff]

I don’t know the specifics but my guess is that the team responsible for search front end has people who are responsible for Easter eggs. Someone, maybe from that team, would have filed a launch ticket for that specific feature, and quickly obtained approvals from privacy, legal, and product management people. Then some engineer and designer probably volunteered themselves to do the work, and did it. Generally launch approvals are fairly streamlined, and only get bogged down when the thing being launched has complex privacy, security, or legal considerations. In this case I’d imagine those issues are almost nonexistent so that’s why it could happen so quickly.