The Museum of Hoaxes Forum star
our sister site - The Mad Science Museum
About
facebook twitter rss
The Archive of Hoaxes Before 1700 1700-1799 1800-1868 1869-1913 1914-1949 1950-1976 1977-1989 1990-1999 21st Century
Sub-Archives   Hoax Photo Archive April Fools Archive Tall-Tale Creature Archive
2012 doomsday calendar
Tom Spring, writing for Computer World, describes many of the jokes and tricks hidden in Google's various websites and programs. One that I wasn't aware of is that Nessie regularly surfaces on iGoogle:

set your alarm to 3:14 a.m. and your browser to the beach-themed iGoogle page. At precisely that time each day, Nessie surfaces for 60 seconds, then takes a deep breath and dives back under the dark loch's surface. Why that time of the morning? Well, according to programmers' lore, Google developers did it to pay homage to the mathematical quantity Pi.

I don't think I'll ever get to see this, since 3:14 am is way past my bedtime. (I now have great trouble staying up past midnight, unlike in grad school when I would regularly still be awake at sunrise.)

Another hidden Google joke is "Google Gothic". Type this phrase into the Google search engine, and then hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button. You'll be taken to Googoth, a search engine catering to "dark, gothic, industrial, and alternative topics."
Categories: Cryptozoology
Posted by Alex on Wed Mar 19, 2008
Comments (13)
All text Copyright © 2011 by Alex Boese, except where otherwise indicated. All rights reserved.