Google's Ascii Easter Egg | Hacker News Reader

Google's Ascii Easter Egg

features.csmonitor.com

17 pointsphyscab9 comments

"Never heard of Acsii? It’s a kind of digital art that uses computer letters to paint objects – something like a Lego project but instead of bricks it uses dashes, hyphens, X’s, O’s, slashes, and whatever else your keyboard can come up with."

Oh really? I thought Ascii was the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, not an art form. It was used for such, hence "ascii art"

here's the punchline: http://www.google.com/search?q=ascii+art

As frivolous as this seems, I think it's actually a really good idea. Google do this in a bunch of places. However unlike the MS flight simulator they are discoverable with use.

The reason why this is important is it both delights the customer as well as giving them an incentive to share that delight. Since it's a "secret" feature they gain social kudos for sharing it with their peers. This of course encourages to people to use Google, both through recommendation and for the chance of more delight.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=answer%20to%20life%...

Strangely, I can see a Bing advertisement on the right on Google when I search for "ascii art". Google is letting Bing buy adwords ? :-/

> Google is letting Bing buy adwords ?

Perhaps they are worried about some sort of anti-trust suit...?

That's figlet output, by the way, in the "small" font.

Someone at Google likes figlet. There's a Gmail theme that uses it, too.

It’s unclear when Google planted this Easter egg, but it seems many people learned about it for the first time last night after the company’s search czar Marissa Mayer revealed it in a tweet.

They must have released it over the weekend b/c I did a search for "ascii art" on Thursday and Google displayed the regular logo.

Don't hold me to this, but I think I remember seeing this a while ago. The distinctive ascii google logo, it triggered something in my head...

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