Google+ celebrates the Lunar New Year with a special costume for Mr. Jingles, the friendly Google+ mascot. "Countries across Asia are beginning Lunar New Year celebrations to welcome in the year of the sheep. In China, hundreds of millions of people are travelling home in what is considered the world's biggest annual human migration. State media says about three billion passenger trips will be made by plane, train and car over the 40-day period," reports BBC.


Here's the animated version:


There's also a Google doodle for Lunar New Year. Google uses an animation which illustrates that 2015 is the Year of the Sheep (sheep, goat or ram, since there's a single Chinese word for all of them).

Mr. Jingles, the Google+ mascot, looks different today. He has a cute rose to celebrate Valentine's Day. You can find the funny animation in the Google+ notification box: in Google+ for desktop, Google+ mobile apps and most Google services.


Here's the animation:


When click the +1 button, Google+ shows some animated hearts:


You can also check last year's Easter Egg for Valentine's Day and today's Google doodles.


"Whether a time for a romantic date, to catch up with friends, or catch up on cat videos, Valentine's Day is a good excuse to connect with the world around you. As nerds, the doodle team wanted to sweeten up our homepage with ways in which technology brings people together," explains Google.

The reCAPTCHA team also celebrates Valentine's Day with a special CAPTCHA:


{ Thanks, Fred. }

Google Translate has a cool Easter Egg for Christmas: when translating "Happy holidays" or "Santa Claus", Google shows an image of Santa Claus and links to Google's Santa Tracker.


{ Thanks, Emanuele Bartolomucci. }

Mr. Jingles has some new Christmas lights. Open the Google+ notifications pane in Google+ and in many other Google services, mark as read all the notifications and click the bell icon to see the lights.


"All these colorful lights should surely help Santa find me," says Mr. Jingles.

Here's the animation:


And here are last year's festive costumes. Merry Christmas!

Chrome's latest Canary release has an updated offline error page. It still includes a small dinosaur image, a funny way to show how quickly your computer can become a relic from the past without an Internet connection.


The error page has an Easter Egg: if you press space, it lets you play a game. "Your only goal is to avoid hitting cacti. The T. Rex jumps by hitting the space bar. Fret not if you do hit an obstacle, because Chrome T. Rex doesn't stay down for long. (Hit the game-over refresh icon, and you're back at it.) The game tracks your progress and high score, but stats are lost if the window closes or is refreshed," reports Mashable.

Google has a funny error page at google.com/teapot. It says: "418. I'm a teapot. The requested entity body is short and stout. Tip me over and pour me out." If you click the teapot, you'll see a nice animation.


So what's this 418 error? You may have noticed HTTP status codes like 404 (page not found) or 403 (forbidden). There are many other 4xx error codes, but 418 was only used for an Easter Egg. "This code was defined in 1998 as one of the traditional IETF April Fools' jokes, in RFC 2324, Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, and is not expected to be implemented by actual HTTP servers." Here's the text from the document: "Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot should result in the error code '418 I'm a teapot'. The resulting entity body MAY be short and stout."


{ via Search Engine Land }

This is really cool: you can take some of the Google Search Easter Eggs, change the query and they will still work. For example, you can replace "do a barrel roll" with "google maps" like this: https://www.google.com/search?q=do+a+barrel+roll#q=google+maps. Start with https://www.google.com/search?q=do+a+barrel+roll#q=, then add the new query, while replacing space with +.


This also works for the "blink html" Easter Egg: https://www.google.com/search?q=blink+html#q=las+vegas and the "tilt" Easter Egg: https://www.google.com/search?q=tilt#q=android+l.

{ via Search Engine Land }

Like many other sites, Google uses the robots exclusion standard and has its own robots.txt files that instruct web crawlers to exclude some publicly available content. To celebrate robots.txt's 20th birthday, Google created a funny killer-robots.txt file with the following text:

User-Agent: T-1000
User-Agent: T-800
Disallow: /+LarryPage
Disallow: /+SergeyBrin

T-800 is The Terminator, the cyborg portrayed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, while T-1000 is the robot assassin from the Terminator 2. The killer-robots.txt file prevents T-800 and T-1000 from killing Larry Page and Sergey Brin.


Last year, Google acquired Boston Dynamics, a company that "has gained an international reputation for machines that walk with an uncanny sense of balance and even — cheetahlike — run faster than the fastest humans". Here are some videos.


The New York Times notes that "although the videos frequently inspire comments that the robots will evolve into scary killing machines straight out of the Terminator movies, Dr. Raibert has said in the past that he does not consider his company to be a military contractor — it is merely trying to advance robotics technology."

A Hacker News comment mentions that "at Google I/O a protestor interrupted a presentation to yell that Google made killer robots. There have been a lot of jokes internally about it." Indeed, a protester interrupted the Google I/O keynote by yelling that "You work for a totalitarian company that builds robots that kill people!"

{ Thanks, Herin. }

Google Maps has a few funny Easter Eggs for UK directions:

* a dragon can get you from Snowdon to Brecon Beacons in only 21 minutes


* the Loch Ness Monster can get you from Fort Augustus to Urquhart Castle


* you can use the Royal Carriage between Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle


* "If you've ever ventured to Oxford or Cambridge, you'll know that punting – steering a flat-bottomed boat on a narrow or shallow river – is a defining characteristic of both cities. If you want travel between Magdalene College and Mathematical Bridge (Cambridge) or Magdalen College and Wolfson College (Oxford) by water, Google Maps has got you covered," found The Next Web.


{ via The Next Web }

There's a cool Easter Egg in Google Voice Search: if you say "Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right", Google will answer: "Cheat mode unlocked, unlimited free Google searches". This is the Konami cheat code originally used for Nintendo games.


You can try this Easter Egg in the Google Search app for Android and iOS and in the Google Search site if you use Chrome for desktop.


The Konami code was also used as an Easter Egg in Google Reader, Google Docs (create a new document and press "Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right", then type ba and press Enter), Play Games and even for the Chromebook Pixel.

{ via Search Engine Land and Pierre Far }

There's a new Google Easter Egg: search for [blink html] and the words "blink" and "html" will start to flash slowly. It also works for [blink tag] Google uses CSS3 animations to emulate the <blink> HTML element because it is no longer supported by modern browsers.

"The blink element is a non-standard presentational HTML element that indicates to a user agent (generally a web browser) that the page author intends the content of the element to blink (that is, alternate between being visible and invisible). Despite its initial popularity amongst home users in the 1990s, it has since fallen out of favor due to its overuse and the difficulty it presents in reading," explains Wikipedia.


{ via Search Engine Roundtable and Ilya Grigorik }

Google+ has a special Easter Egg for Valentine's Day. Mr. Jingles, the Google+ mascot, transformed into a heart. You can find the animation in the Google+ notification box: in Google+ for desktop, Google+ mobile apps and most Google services.


Here's the animation that's displayed when you click the icon. This is the "retina" double-sized version:


"I <3 you, people of Google+! You've made me feel like your Valentine many times over," says Mr. Jingles.

You can also check the costumes for New Year's party, Christmas, Thanksgiving Day, Halloween, 15 years of Google and 2 years of Google+.

Mr. Jingles, the Google+ mascot, has some special yellow glasses for the New Year's party. It's a joyful way to wish everyone a Happy New Year.

"I'll be up late tonight looking forward to 2014. Have fun and stay safe tonight," says Mr. Jingles.


Click the icon and you should see some fireworks. Here's the animation:


And here's the disco doodle from the Google homepage:


Happy New Year!

Mr. Jingles has a special Christmas costume. You can find it in the Google+ notification box: in Google+ and most Google services and in the Google+ app for iOS and Android.



Here's the animation that's displayed when you click the icon. This is the "retina" double-sized version:


There's also a reindeer version:


I like the alternative text for Jingles icons: "Jingles - Mascot of a bell with a smiley face".

{ Thanks, Mukil. }

The Pegman icon from the new Google Maps looks different: it now has a Santa hat. The classic Google Maps still shows the standard icon.



Check this Google+ album to see almost 200 outfits created when Pegman was added to the new Google Maps.


{ Thanks, Mukil. }

Google has a new Easter Egg for Christmas, but this time it's only for mobile devices. Search for [let's go caroling] using an Android or iOS device or use voice search and say "let's go caroling" and you'll see a list of 5 carols you can play: "Jingle Bells", "Up on the House Top", "Deck the Halls", "O Christmas Tree" and "We Wish You a Merry Christmas". Tap one of the carols and Google will start playing the karaoke version of the carol, while also displaying the lyrics.





Maybe this Easter Egg will actually be useful.

Last month, I mentioned that Google's search results pages got some special decorations when searching for [Hanukkah] and [Festivus]. Nothing for Christmas? Todd Kuk, a reader of this blog, says he noticed an animated image when searching for [Christmas], [A Christmas carol] and other queries that include "Christmas". I tried these queries, but I don't see the ornaments.


The animated GIFs:



Todd also recorded this video:


Here are the decorations from 2011 and from 2012.

{ Thanks, Todd. }

Google shows a lot of festive doodles, Easter Eggs and special decoration. Here are some of them:

- The Thanksgiving doodle is actually a video



Here's the video:


"Thanksgiving Day is a national holiday celebrated primarily in the United States and Canada as a day of giving thanks for the blessing of the harvest and of the preceding year."

- Mr. Jingles is hungry


Here's the animation:


- Hanukkah search results


Here's the mobile Safari version:


... and the mobile Chrome version:


"Hanukkah, also known as the Festival of Lights and Feast of Dedication, is an eight-day Jewish holiday."

- Festivus search results include the aluminum Festivus pole


"Festivus, a well-celebrated parody, has become a secular holiday celebrated on December 23 which serves as an alternative to participating in the pressures and commercialism of the Christmas and holiday season. Originally a family tradition of a scriptwriter working on the American sitcom Seinfeld, the holiday entered popular culture after it was made the focus of a 1997 episode of the program."

As Google says, "it's all about Thanksgivukkah in 2013. This overlap of Thanksgiving and Hanukkah won't happen again for another 70,000+ years, making it a once-in-a-lifetime event".

Happy Thanksgiving! Happy Hanukkah! Happy Holidays!

{ Thanks, Mukil, Emanuele, Camilo and Florian. }