Spinner | Hacker News Reader

Spinner

google.com

208 pointshakanito80 comments

Open articleView on HN

https://www.google.com/search?q=random%20number%20between%20...

Probably fairly easy for engineers to add these

https://www.google.com/search?q=10m+timer

My favourite is still this though: https://www.google.com/search?q=3*cos(sqrt(x*x%2By*y))%2B5

https://www.google.com/search?q=3*cos(sqrt(x*x%2By*y))%2B5#q...)

Run choppily on firefox, and crash my session on chrome. Thanks.

I guessed, and was pleasantly surprised recently when I searched "flip a coin". Had to decide where to go to dinner and flipping a virtual coin did just fine

Also https://www.google.com/search?q=timer

I found this accidentally today while searching https://www.google.com/search?q=countdown%20clock - came in handy while we ran some lightning talks at the office.

So is there a big manifest of these functions in a file somewhere on Google's servers? I'm just wondering how this looks in code.

https://www.google.com/search?q=animal+sounds

Interesting the dice roll forces a refresh to reroll and but the random number one doesn't.

Try 100/100 min/max for the random number generator. Interesting what you can find poking around the JS.

Or -99999999999/99999999999.

I like 'solitaire' personally.

https://www.google.com/search?q=solitaire

I wonder what the process is, as a google engineer, to get the artwork done for something like this? Do you just put in a ticket and some time later the SVGs turn up in your repo? Is there an artwork queue, or is it a political fight for access to the illustrators time?

Hmm, when did this appear? That's got to be pretty irritating if you run a solitaire site to earn a living from the ad revenue. (I have a friend who does this - not the World of Solitaire guy, although fair play to him because he has almost every variant known to humankind on there.)

Like Windows subsuming all useful third party utilities into Windows itself? If Google really went all in on these sort of search based functions, it could provide an angle of attack for DOJ/EU.

Well, yeah, that's sort of the line I'm thinking along.

90% it's engineers doing something they think is cool/kooky/funky without thinking about the consequences. As in, you know those top two sites have taken a hit on revenue because someone on a fat salary at Google wanted to do something cool with their 20% time, or some similar story.

But there's always this 10% suspicion, which is perhaps amplified by the controversy around AMP - and maybe it's a little bit unfair - that they ultimately never want you to leave the Google site.

That may be the case but, even if it's not, they do this stuff that they think is cool, but they do it without any sense of responsibility or empathy.

That solitaire game is a fairly limited implementation - admittedly rather a nice one - and it lacks a lot of the variants, and other bells and whistles of the top solitaire sites. Nevertheless it's going to be up there for all time, stealing traffic from and reducing the revenue to those other sites, and it won't make a jot of difference either way to Google.

I don't really think that's OK.

I run World of Solitaire, currently #1 Google result for the solitaire search term. I haven't noticed any measurable change in traffic to my site since they put this up. Probably because folks can get a much better experience on my site compared to the mini version they created. Maybe simpler website with tools such as spinners, randomizers, etc may see more of an impact.

Well that's good to know at any rate, and I imagine people who've already used your site will go back to it rather than play Google's simple version, but I wonder if longer-term it'll mean a drop in organic traffic? Time will tell, I suppose.

I created and run World of Solitaire. I'm not upset at Google at all. I am where I am today thanks to Google :)

Heh - fair enough. :)

According to this [0] you can also try

  calculator
  color picker
  unit converter

I didn't find anything about the other features mentioned here though.

[0] https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/3284611

My favourite: https://www.google.com/search?q=metronome

It's interesting that of all these bits of functionality being posted... none of them share the same UI. Seems oddly in-consistent (seeing as its part of Search - their core product - and it wouldn't be an insanely complex task to rectify).

Although I know its much easier for me to say that as a non-Googler than it may actually be :p

The highest integer for the random number generator is 9,999,999,999

Lemme get this straight: they're already collecting all my personal data and browsing history, and now they want my RANDOM NUMBERS too?? No way. #myrandint

Just add a 1 to the end of any number you generate with their servers. That should delay the government long enough that you can escape with the Zip disk. (You know the one)

https://www.xkcd.com/221/

I like these things. DuckDuckGo has them as "instant answers" and you're encouraged to add new ones:

https://duck.co/ia

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=roll+seven+dice

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=random+person

I love that feature. But my go-to dice roller is just "rolldice" on the command line. rolldice 2d6, rolldice 3d20, whatever it is, very useful. I use it to generate little worlds to draw, things like that.

Supports rpg-style rolls to.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=roll+4d4%2B4

Wolfram Alpha also supports it (see example at bottom), but much slower:

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=roll+4d4%2B4

Google and Bing support dice rolls, but not the rpg-syntax.

Instant answers is neat, I made a command line gem for it : https://github.com/wlib/duckgo

daniel@pancake:~$ duckgo roll seven dice --- Type: Exclusive Answer: Answer: ", , , , , , " Type: dice_roll

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=roll+nine+hundred+thousand+dice

Still waiting on my answer :(

Really? I got 3148825 back within about two seconds.

Simpler format to remember for random numbers: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=random+10 Random passwords can be generated: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=password+16

What am I supposed to see? It just shows a dictionary entry for spinner and normal results.

Same here. I suspect because google insists to redirect to my non-US country?

Not sure where you're located, but in Google Canada I see the spinner.

Was redirected to .co.in and spinner works.

I couldn't see it in the French version of google.ca, but when I opened the English version in a private window it worked.

It solely seems to depend on the Google user language settings. Works for both the Canadian and German Google with the language set to "English". One gets what one would expect (with "spinner" roughly translating to "idiot") when trying this with the German Google set to German.

It displays a graphical spinner (think a wheel from a game show or something) and spins to a random number on it.

Add &hl=en to the URL and it should work.

This makes it work for me also. Mods should edit OP URL to include this.

They did but now they took the "spinner" part out of the url

Edit: Nevermind, already fixed

It seems to only work in Chrome. Firefox mobile shows nothing unusual.

Works fine on firefox desktop for me. Its some kind of locale issue I think, as others have suggested.

Once the spinner picks the right number, a code is revealed.

Nor does firefox on desktop. Chromium did work though.

It appears/functions on iOS Safari just fine.

Safari 10.0 works fine as well.

I had to request the desktop site on firefox mobile to be able to see it...

Firefox on android has a checkbox in the menu for Request desktop site. Then it loads the spinner.

It looks like this: http://streamable.com/orob8

The urban dictionary result (#1 for me, I hope this doesn't say anything about me) provides an excellent counter-point to the charm of this tool.

Ah, the internet.

I am so curious about how these relatively simple easter eggs work behind the scenes. How are they incorporated into the core search repo? Surely the guys in charge of that beast aren't allowing these things anywhere near the core code of the GOOG empire.

Everything is one repo at Google. So yes, it shares repo with search. :-)

There are many, many servers involved to display a results page. These things probably are an RPC to a dedicated server. Haven't checked though.

Slightly more impressive: https://www.google.com/search?q=play+dreidel

https://www.google.co.il/search?q=play+dreidel

Attention to detail: Replacing the ש with a פ when spinning in Israel.

https://www.google.com/search?q=play+tic+tac+toe

Sadly this doesn't work:

https://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=play+noughts+and+cr...

I'm not in general a bing fan, but this is super useful

http://www.bing.com/search?q=speed+test&qs=n&form=QBLH&sp=-1...

It works on Google as well.

note: only on google.com ! Not on google.co.uk

I usually go for: https://www.google.com/search?q=askew

Google should figure out a way to better expose the features of their web services. Most often we seem to find out about a Google feature by chance alone.

For little gags like this I'd say that's part of the charm. But for actual functionality, I agree that discoverability is limited.

Hey man, c'mon. Your supposed to search for things with Google.

That's like, what their specialty is.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

Quick fix for the link https://www.google.com/search?q=spinner&hl=en

Shameless plug: http://jeffreyrosenbluth.github.io/lottery/

The links people have dropped here are a hoot...but the first thing I thought of from the headline was the old Spinner music service that got bought out by Netscape, ages ago.

Anyone else bothered by how the wheel doesn't stop when you tap on it when it's spinning?

No, because that would be cheating. Once you start the spin (you can pull it back to get a good start!), you can't just stop it where ever you'd like. "Wheel of fortune" rules apply here.

Origin story?

Once upon a time, marketing realized that free publicity would happen if Easter eggs were added to the product.

Including posting the findings on YouTube:

  https://www.google.com/search?q=google+easter+eggs&tbm=vid

  "about 1,700,000 results"

is there a google search that finds a list of search terms that show special pages?

There should be some switch for proper zero-based numbering :)

Is this open source? I'd like to add this to a project :)

This is cool. There's also:

Flip a coin

Roll a dice

Play Pacman

Do a barrel roll

Reply on news.ycombinator.com