Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google showing animated ships when searching “ever given”

google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 56 posts

Re: Google showing animated ships when searching “ever given”

#31

Post by zaphar »

2bitencryption wrote: post #29
jsjabsvsjs wrote: post #19

> Easter eggs can be a way for software engineers and designers to put a bit of their own personality into the product through humor and wit. They're a way of saying, 'I made this and I love it.' Their hidden nature means that those who discover them are likely to be people who spend a lot of time using the product. > This act of discovery is great for building an emotional connection between the people who create so…

but let me ask, in this day and age, on google.com, the most visited website on the planet and the most venerable of all Google's properties (it is the face of their trillion(?) dollar company)... ...do we really think this was a fun little easter egg from a software engineer having some fun over lunch? I imagine that could have been the case in the mid 2000's. But the front page of google? surely there were meetings…

I worked on the front page at google around 10 years ago. It was all those things you describe back then too. And at least then there were not multiple reviews/meetings or lawyers involved in releasing something like this. If it's still the same then this probably started as a lunch time conversation and was implemented before lunch the next day.

Re: Google showing animated ships when searching “ever given”

#32

Post by [deleted] »

2bitencryption wrote: post #29
jsjabsvsjs wrote: post #19

> Easter eggs can be a way for software engineers and designers to put a bit of their own personality into the product through humor and wit. They're a way of saying, 'I made this and I love it.' Their hidden nature means that those who discover them are likely to be people who spend a lot of time using the product. > This act of discovery is great for building an emotional connection between the people who create so…

but let me ask, in this day and age, on google.com, the most visited website on the planet and the most venerable of all Google's properties (it is the face of their trillion(?) dollar company)... ...do we really think this was a fun little easter egg from a software engineer having some fun over lunch? I imagine that could have been the case in the mid 2000's. But the front page of google? surely there were meetings…

[deleted]

Re: Google showing animated ships when searching “ever given”

#33

Post by enneff »

warent wrote: post #22
DoreenMichele wrote: post #12

Whatever our criticisms of Google, it's part of our internet culture in sometimes weird and wonderful ways. This seems kind of like a little happy dance for the world after so much hand wringing and legitimate worry.

I'll be the cynical one this time and say that I'd rather carefully calculated PR stunts didnt have an affect of making corporations seem more fun and human. Sociopaths wear all kinds of convincing masks

As a google employee I’m glad the culture of doing fun things perseveres from the early days, despite our massive growth.

Re: Google showing animated ships when searching “ever given”

#34

Post by dang »

ipsum2 wrote: post #2

Source code (HN removed the emojis)                                                                   &nb…

I had to put some newlines in your nbsps because the post was borking the page layout. Sorry; it's our bug.

Re: Google showing animated ships when searching “ever given”

#35

Post by nabakin »

If you guys enjoy easter eggs, you might like to know about the easter egg subreddit. https://old.reddit.com/r/eastereggs

Full disclosure: I own/run it. Sorry if there are posts about Easter. Our automod config works pretty well but some posts leak through this time of year ;)

Re: Google showing animated ships when searching “ever given”

#36

Post by ipsum2 »

dang wrote: post #34
ipsum2 wrote: post #2

Source code (HN removed the emojis)                                                                   &nb…

I had to put some newlines in your nbsps because the post was borking the page layout. Sorry; it's our bug.

Whoops, my bad. From the downvotes, I guess HN doesn't find it amusing that Google is using a pre-CSS era, 1999 technique to space the ships apart.

Re: Google showing animated ships when searching “ever given”

#37

Post by shadowgovt »

comboy wrote: post #21
SilverRed wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much maintenance and testing these things add. Sure it would be trivial to get it working now, but they must have to do so many checks to see its not breaking on other browsers and then that it doesn't cause issues in the future.

Haha, are you kidding me? Using firefox try cilcking pause button in bottom left on youtube, then hitting space to play it (event is handled twice, video will only play fraction of second). It's been like that for .. 5 years +? With google photos / gmail / hangouts it's like Google is trying to actively discourage you from using anything other than Chrome by giving you just enough bugs to make you really annoyed but…

> They should have it all working flawlessly at their scale

Insufficient economic incentives.

Firefox is ~4% of the installed base for web browsers (as per externally-visible metrics). The priority for bug fixing is going to look something like Chrome -> Chrome (mobile devices) -> Safari -> Safari (mobile devices) -> Edge -> Firefox.

... additionally, if the same behavior works correctly in Chrome, Safari, and Edge, it unfortunately indicates it's more likely to be a standards-noncompliance bug on Mozilla's side than an error in the YouTube implementation.

EDIT: Specifically, it might be this bug. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1487102

Re: Google showing animated ships when searching “ever given”

#38

Post by Dma54rhs »

enneff wrote: post #33
warent wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be the cynical one this time and say that I'd rather carefully calculated PR stunts didnt have an affect of making corporations seem more fun and human. Sociopaths wear all kinds of convincing masks

As a google employee I’m glad the culture of doing fun things perseveres from the early days, despite our massive growth.

I still don't consent you tracking me on web properties all around the world. Crazy how people justify doing these things at the time everyone needs to question themselves. No means no ib this context as well.

Re: Google showing animated ships when searching “ever given”

#39

Post by AdamJacobMuller »

enneff wrote: post #33
warent wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be the cynical one this time and say that I'd rather carefully calculated PR stunts didnt have an affect of making corporations seem more fun and human. Sociopaths wear all kinds of convincing masks

As a google employee I’m glad the culture of doing fun things perseveres from the early days, despite our massive growth.

I have to say that I'm impressed that at the scale of google they have the ability, and the desire, to approve and turn around small fun things like this so quickly.

I assume there must still be a fairly deep process to get approval to do something like this, but, one which must be hyper-efficient and streamlined. If google took even 24 or 48 hours to approve a change like this the moment would be gone.

I'm very curious if you know, and could share, anything about what that process looks like? Is it actually a formal process or are people just encouraged to bring up off-the-wall ideas to senior leadership who are empowered to approve things like this?

Re: Google showing animated ships when searching “ever given”

#40

Post by sixothree »

ithkuil wrote: post #27
Shorel wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is both things of course, to different people. It is something fun to do for the coders who implemented the animated ships, and most of the people who see them. Likewise, it is a calculated PR stunt by the executives who approved the release.

Or even better: a calculated decision to create a culture where people who are not executives can approve a release that ultimately functions as a PR stunt, without requiring everyone involved to necessarily see it that way. It scales much better

I have a difficult time believing this didn't go through multiple layers of review.
Post reply on HN