LONDON: Google’s easter eggs — funny little images, programmes or widgets — are legendary, but many of them lie dormant, just waiting for users to type the magic words into the search box. Are they clever? Some are. Are they useful? Most aren’t. But they are all a welcome distraction from working. They all work in Chrome on desktop, most work on mobile too, and some of them also work in other browsers. Barrel roll An oldie but a goodie. Typing either ‘do a barrel roll’ or ‘z or r twice’ will make the Google search page roll flip 360 degrees. Why? For fun of course. Both phrases are a reference to Star Fox, in which you had to hit the Z or R button twice to roll your fighter left or right. Tilting Typing ‘askew’ into Google sets the whole page off at a tilted angle. ‘Tilt’ also used to work, but I could not get it to do anything in my testing. Star Wars text Have you ever wanted your Google search results to scroll down the page mimicking the Star Wars opening text? No, me neither, but you can by typing ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away’. Blinking Typing in ‘’ searches Google for blink and then makes every instance of the word blink in the results. Google like it’s 1998 Do you remember what Google looked like when it first lurched onto the open web in 1998? The aesthetic was similar, but 2016’s web is quite a few leaps forward in design over the late 1990s web. Type ‘google in 1998’ to show what the search engine was first like and conduct searches like you have just lost 18 years. Zerg rush! Bored at work and the only thing you have access to is Google? Type ‘zerg rush’ into the search box, hit enter and prepare to frantically click on a surge of little Google ‘o’s as they attempt to eat your page. Zerg rush was a tactic employed by Zerg players in the 1998 strategy game StarCraft, which involved the sending of hundreds of cheap, low-level units to overwhelm an opponent.