All the Google Easter eggs worth checking out

Tech companies can have fun, too! Google is well-known for its nerdy sense of humor, which includes April Fools’ Day pranks (Google Apps for Business Dogs, anyone?) and Easter eggs hidden throughout the company’s numerous products.

I’m not talking about the Easter eggs you hunt down on Sunday morning — I’m talking about hidden jokes created by software developers for fun (because, well, software development can be pretty boring if you don’t know how to have fun). Tech Easter eggs come in a variety of different forms: secret messages, cute animations, mini-games, or in Google’s case, creatively funny search results. If you search hard enough, you’ll find Google’s search results are not always straightforward and simple — sometimes they’re askew, other times they’re getting eaten by rogue zerglings.

The master list of Google Easter eggs worth…
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Most of Google’s Easter eggs have a nerdy bent. There are plenty of numeral-based eggs (the answer to life the universe and everything is…a number), as well as eggs that pay homage to HTML tags, old-school arcade games (and new-school PC games), and Google’s original website.

If you look hard enough, you’ll find them, but looking hard is a lot of effort — wouldn’t you rather we just tell you what to look for? That’s what I thought. We rounded up 27 of Google’s coolest Easter eggs worth checking out, so take a look at the gallery above.

(Some of these Easter eggs are sadly now defunct, including the Google Maps jet-ski advice, Google’s ASCII art search, Google Maps’ pegman in Legoland, and ninjas on Google Reader.)