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Google’s barrel-roll Easter Egg goes viral

Let’s face it, folks: sometimes you just want to do a barrel roll.

Luckily, the clever crew at Google understand this need, and included a funky little Easter Egg in their search engine that became a viral sensation over the last 24 hours.

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As many people discovered recently, conducting a search for “do a barrel roll” in the Google search engine results in, well… your screen doing a barrel roll (rotating 360 degrees in a clockwise direction). It’s worth noting that the trick doesn’t work on all browsers, but should definitely show up if you’re using Google Chrome or Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

For those who can’t place where the line comes from, “do a barrel roll” is one of the early instructions given to players in Nintendo’s classic space-shooter Starfox. Clearly, the Google team has good taste in games.

If you’re looking for other fun tricks to try in Google’s search engine, enter any of these phrases (without the quotation marks, of course): “tilt” “askew” “answer to life, the universe, and everything” (that last one’s for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fans).

If you have any more favorites, make sure to let us know in the comment section.

Rick Marshall
A veteran journalist with more than two decades of experience covering local and national news, arts and entertainment, and…
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