I think it's: "Searches related to troll ... 4chan"
Or... he's trolled us :)
Help me - don't get it.... whats so special about this google query?
The highlighted instances of "kerning" have extra letter-spacing.
ie. no kerning
Not no kerning, just bad kerning.
Not bad kerning either, necessarily. (It's automatically kerned by the type engine regardless of the letter-spacing property.) Just loose tracking. It's fairly common for typographers to track bold text slightly looser than book text so as to lighten its typographic color.
Since I was about to say the same thing you already did, I’ll add that the difference is that kerning refers to adjusting the spacing between specific character pairs instead of the whole text (which is what letter-spacing/tracking does). For example the AV pair usually needs to be kerned to make the glyphs partially overlap so that they don’t look too far apart.
This is now both my favorite and my most hated google easter egg.
The interesting thing is that "view selection source" on instances of the 'kerning' word don't show any shenanigans. Gotta dig deeper... Edit: ok, it's "em{letter-spacing:1px}" in the CSS.
Subtle...
xkcd.com/1015
Incidentally, if you want to see a bit of text most viewers of that comic probably haven't, look for <div id="transcript" in the source.
I had no idea… thanks for pointing that out. Doesn't seem too useful for those of us that can see the comic for ourselves, but a nice easter egg nonetheless.
It's pretty fantastic for finding the xkcd strip you're thinking of via Google, since the comic transcripts are read by Googlebot.
Really cool feature. Thanks for sharing!
(Incidentally, did Randall not write a transcript for the latest comic 1216? I'm not able to find one yet.)