You’ve got 20 minutes to kill before your next meeting. Twitter’s boring, Instagram is full of Reels and you’ve seen enough ‘I wake up at 5am, and drank nothing but protein powder all day’ LinkedIn posts to last a lifetime. But you’ve got 20 minutes until your next Zoom call, and who wants to do work in that time?
We’ve all been stuck with a spare 5 minutes, or time to kill before the end of the day (don’t worry we won’t tell your boss). Thankfully, the Google geeks have thought about this exact moment and created some fun things to do with Google that you can strategically use to kill some time.
Fun things to type into Google
Do a barrel roll
If you’re prone to dizziness you might want to avoid this one! Ask Google to do a barrel roll and you’ll get a nice lil twirl.
The phrase ‘do a barrel roll comes from an old video game, and which the internet then turned into a meme (as the internet likes to do).
Anagram
Need an anagram of the word anagram? Google’s got you covered.
Recursion
Recursion. Pronounced: ruh·kuh·shn. Defined as ‘the repeated application of a recursive procedure or definition.’
So if you click the Did you mean link Google will send you into a recurring loop. Neat.
Askew
You know when something does exactly what it says on the tin? Yeah, we’re not going to explain this one.
Answer to life, the universe, and everything
A cool call-back to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, if you’re having an existential crisis, don’t worry. Google has the answer!
The answer to life, the universe, and everything? Of course, it’s 42.
The loneliest number
Google knows what Filter has been telling us all along:
One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do
Two can be as bad as one
It’s the loneliest number since the number one
Once in a blue moon
Once in a blue moon, a pretty way of saying something very rarely happens. But how often actually is once in a blue moon? Google’s got the answer.
Google in 1998
Fancy being time travelled back to the ‘90s? Simple search ‘Google in 1998’ and before you know it you’ll be listening to Westlife and wearing Juicy Couture.
Google Gravity and click I’m feeling lucky
Ever had a longing to be an astronaut? Simply ‘Google gravity’ and hit I’m feeling lucky for a truly authentic space experience (you can even fling the buttons and stuff around, it’s pretty fun)
Friends character
WE WERE ON A BREAK! Or maybe you are, now, trying to kill some time?
Bad pun, but it’s the best we could think of to introduce our next Google secret trick. Friends fans everywhere rejoice simply type in the name of your favourite friends character, followed by ‘friends’ (e.g. monica friends) and click the icon next to their name for a fun animation, unique to their character.
Cha cha slide
Are you ready to get funky? Because this is something new (not really – it might be? We don’t know, but it’s cool)
Search the phrase, click the icons, and see if you can keep up with the Googs’!
Google tuner
Are you a keen musician with an out of tune instrument?! Well have we got the tool for you!!
It’s Google Tuner. Just search ‘google tuner’. You’re welcome.
DVD screensaver
If you leave this one for long enough, you might get the super-rare-one-in-a-million corner bounce.
Let us know if you do – we’ve been watching this for about 4 hours now and we still haven’t seen it.
I’m feeling curious
This is actually a pretty neat one – tell Google ‘I’m feeling curious’ and it’ll return with a random question and answer. And when we say random, we do mean random.
Thing to play on Google
Most of these games we’re going to explore were set up on Google Mirror, elgooG
“Google’s Easter Egg is just one of a huge number of gaming-themed treats that are hidden in the search engine. But over time, many of them have become ineffective(not working), AKA “Killed by Google”.”
elgooG says their aim is to ‘restore, discover and create interactive Google Easter Eggs’ so users can find, use and play all the best secret Google tricks and Easter eggs – a good one to bookmark for time wasting! Let’s take a look at some of our favourites:
Play Zerg Rush
An old-school shooter game, where your aim is to defend your search results from the enemy (the o’s from the Google logo)
Endless hours of fun! Or enough to keep you going till 5PM, your call.
Play Atari Breakout
So apparently the highest score anyone’s recorded for this is 110,765. The highest we got in the office was 507. So you know, pretty close.
See if you can beat our score, we might send you something (probably not).
Play the Dinosaur game
An endless runner game, originally created as a resolution for people stuck without internet, and now added to the list of Google Easter Eggs. This is an OG Google game, well worth checking out.
Play Snake
You don’t have to dig out the old Nokia 3310 to play this classic. Throwing it back all the way 1976, Snake is too much of a classic to miss out on this one.
Play PAC MAN
This whole section has been a trip down memory lane, and we’re going to end it with perhaps the most nostalgic game of them all. PAC MAN. That’s it, that’s the sentence.
Cool things to do in Google
So we’ve had Google flip for us, defy gravity for us, and do the CHA-CHA slide for us. We’ve played PAC MAN, Snake and Atari Breakout… and you’re still bored?! Fine…
We’ve left the most ‘boring’ ones for last, because they’re not really games, more tools. But they’re still pretty cool things to do in Google. So we’re going to show you them anyway.
Colour picker
Google has a (pretty hand) colour picker, that gives you the HEX, RGB, CMYK, HSV and HSL code of any colour. That’s pretty neat, not sure how you could kill time with it though. Maybe try and match the colour of your t-shirt?
Bonus points if you can tell us why the below colour is special.
Meditate
You’ve just had the most stressful meeting ever, we’re talking Inception levels of stress and confusion. How do you wind down before you’re next one? Try Google’s 1-minute meditation exercise.
Roll a dice
Maybe you need to roll a dice for something? Or you just like rolling dice? You’ve even got options (4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20) plus you can add your own, so that’s… neat?
Metronome
We’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel here. It’s a metronome. Metronome’s count BPM. If you need a metronome (?) Google has one, so there’s that.
Google isn’t just about shopping or SEO
Whilst most people will search Google to buy something, how to spell a word, or if you are a business owner, to improve your organic search Google is so much more than that.
If you find any more of Google’s cool secret tricks, drop us a message.
But when we say cool, we mean cool. The metronome-type of thing isn’t really worth our time.
