Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by red_admiral 695 days ago
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.

3 comments

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 :/