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Comment by ot | Hacker News Reader

Note the bug: "do a barrel roll" skyrocketed at the top of the suggestion lists for "do a ".

So if you have Google Instant enabled, just typing "do a " will instant-search "do a barrel roll" and trigger the effect.

I'm sure this wasn't intended.

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I wonder if the barrel roll effect was intended for a Google Image search on "do a barrel roll" as well. The effect is much more prominent -- and annoying since you see the effect every time you navigate back. (I hadn't seen the meme, so I was browsing for images on it.)

oh yes and it is completely broken on Google Images, at least on my browser (Chrome): a few elements are misplaced during the animation, and it looks like the center of rotation is not the center of the page.

A barrel roll is an off center roll, so that part is probably intentional.

No, the center is off the page so the images are only on screen at the beginning and the end. It is a different effect from the web search one, or at least appears to be.

IMHO, this is not a bug but a feature. "do a barrel roll" is a trending topic today. So it must have been ranked higher in their search suggestions. The first query which is suggested when you say "do a" is "do a barrel roll" which causes the whole page to roll.

Pretty cool - I think we should be appreciative of such efforts rather than cultivating bugs. A standard experience is what Google had offered for years - can you even begin to imagine, what it would have taken for the Product Manager for Google Search to even convince everyone to get this implemented. And this is multiple teams you are talking about here (I am guessing at least 5-6 including engg, QA, monetization, legal, support, branding etc).

Considering the fact that Google has had such easter eggs for years* I don't think getting this one through was that hard.

* "ascii art", "what is the answer to life the universe and everything", "tilt", etc.

Actually, according to a recent Google blog post, this is exactly what should happen for hot trending searches. They tweaked the algorithm to make hot search topics bubble up in the suggestion box and return relevant results for recent news.

Of course, what I am saying is that as a side-effect the easter egg is triggered even if just "do a " is entered, rather than the full key-query.

That's why it doesn't make sense as an easter egg: "do a " is a frequent prefix, people looking for something else could be annoyed by the effect.

However, autocomplete will fill out the rest of the query for the user to see, so they should get a fair idea if they are paying attention... which they should be when the contents suddenly spins.

Yeah but presumably 'do a barrel roll' is intended as a kind of easter egg that only a select few will discover to their intense joy.

I was so delightfully surprised when I went to type it in, expecting something to happen, and it rolled halfway through my query. Awesome!

Definitely a bug since "ascii art" one doesn't work in instant search.

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