Google and YouTube have a long history of hiding jokes, games, references and unexpected animations inside their products. Some have lasted for more than a decade, while others appeared briefly for an anniversary, film release or internet trend before quietly disappearing.

That has created a slightly confusing situation in 2026 because many online lists of “Google and YouTube Easter eggs” are badly out of date. Search for the topic and you will still find instructions telling you to launch Zerg Rush, make YouTube respond to “Use the Force, Luke” or type “1980” while watching a video, even though those features belong to an earlier version of the internet.

Some of the classics still work, however, while Google and YouTube continue introducing new temporary surprises.

Here are the Easter eggs that are worth knowing about in 2026, along with a few famous examples that have disappeared.

Do a barrel roll is still one of Google’s best-known Easter eggs

Search Google for “do a barrel roll” and the entire results page performs a complete rotation before returning to normal.

The effect originally appeared in 2011 and references Star Fox 64, where players are famously told to perform a barrel roll. Searching “z or r twice”, another reference to the game’s controls, can trigger the same effect.

What makes this particular Easter egg unusual is its longevity. Google has introduced and removed many similar tricks over the years, but the barrel roll has survived through numerous redesigns of the search engine.

It remains a wonderfully unnecessary feature, which is probably exactly why people still enjoy it.

Search for “askew” and Google deliberately tilts the page

Another simple Google Search Easter egg can be triggered by searching “askew”.

Instead of doing anything dramatic, Google slightly tilts the search results page.

The joke is almost painfully literal, but that is part of its appeal. It belongs to an earlier style of Google Easter egg in which a search term caused the interface itself to respond.

Like the barrel roll, it has survived far longer than many of Google’s more elaborate hidden games.

PAC-MAN is real, but its history is slightly different from many online lists

Google does have a playable version of PAC-MAN, although describing it simply as a hidden Search Easter egg misses some of the story.

In May 2010, Google celebrated the 30th anniversary of PAC-MAN with its first fully playable interactive Google Doodle. The Google logo itself became part of the maze and players could control PAC-MAN directly from the homepage.

There was even a hidden two-player option. Adding another player introduced Ms. PAC-MAN, who could be controlled separately.

The game became so popular that Google preserved it.

In 2026, the original PAC-MAN experience can still be played through Google’s Doodle archive, along with numerous other interactive Doodles released over the years.

Google also returned to PAC-MAN in 2025 for the game’s 45th anniversary with a Halloween-themed interactive Doodle featuring multiple new mazes.

Google Search contains several games that are not really Easter eggs anymore

Some features often included on Easter egg lists are now better described as built-in Search tools or games.

Search for “Solitaire” and Google can provide a playable game directly from the results. The same applies to Tic-Tac-Toe, where players can select a difficulty level or compete against another person.

Google has also experimented with other playable Search experiences over the years, including Snake and Minesweeper.

These are not particularly secret, but they continue the same playful tradition. Google Search has never been limited entirely to finding webpages; the company has frequently used it as a place for small interactive experiments.

Google can still flip coins and roll dice for you

Not all Google’s hidden amusements are games.

Searching for “flip a coin” provides a digital coin toss, while queries involving dice can generate virtual dice.

There are also Search experiences involving animal sounds and other small interactive features.

Again, these sit somewhere between Easter eggs and useful Search tools, but they are part of the same tradition of Google placing unexpected interactive elements directly inside results.

Google Gravity is not actually a Google Easter egg

This is one of the biggest misconceptions surrounding Google Easter egg lists.

For years, instructions have told users to type “Google Gravity” into Google and click “I’m Feeling Lucky”, after which the Google homepage supposedly collapses under the force of gravity.

The effect is real.

The claim that it is an official Google Easter egg is not.

Google Gravity was created by developer Ricardo Cabello, better known as Mr.doob. The experiment recreated Google’s homepage and allowed its elements to fall and bounce around using browser-based physics.

Clicking “I’m Feeling Lucky” simply took users directly to the external webpage hosting the experiment.

Because it looked so convincingly like Google, it became widely described as a Google Easter egg even though Google itself did not create it.

Modern recreations still exist, but they should be described as third-party tributes rather than hidden Google features.

Zerg Rush was real, but Google removed it

Unlike Google Gravity, Zerg Rush really was an official Google Easter egg.

Introduced in 2012, searching for “Zerg Rush” caused small letter Os to descend across the page and attack the search results. Users had to click the attackers repeatedly before they destroyed everything.

The name referred to the StarCraft strategy of overwhelming an opponent with a large number of units early in a match.

If the Os successfully destroyed the page, they eventually formed “GG”, the familiar gaming abbreviation for “good game”.

It became one of Google’s most elaborate Search Easter eggs.

Unfortunately, it no longer operates on the live Google Search page in 2026.

Several websites have recreated the experience, which is why people sometimes believe the original is still available, but those versions are not being run by Google.

Atari Breakout is another Google classic that disappeared

Google once allowed users to turn Image Search into a game of Breakout.

Searching Google Images for “Atari Breakout” transformed image thumbnails into bricks that could be destroyed with a bouncing ball.

The effect was introduced in 2013 to celebrate the classic Atari game.

Like Zerg Rush, however, the original feature was eventually removed.

It stopped functioning on Google Images years ago, although fan recreations can still be found online.

This is another reason modern Easter egg lists need to be treated carefully: many sites reproduce instructions written when the feature was active without mentioning that Google has since retired it.

Google’s Easter eggs increasingly come and go with pop culture

Modern Google Easter eggs are often temporary rather than permanent.

Over the years, Google Search has included special effects connected to films, television programmes, celebrities, games and major cultural events. Some have appeared for only a limited promotional period and vanished afterwards.

That means an Easter egg that works today may not necessarily exist several years from now.

Older examples have included references to Friends, The Wizard of Oz, Marvel characters, Super Mario Bros. and numerous other fandoms.

For pop-culture fans, that temporary nature has actually become part of the fun. Discovering the effect while it is active can feel like finding something that may soon become another piece of internet history.

YouTube once had far more elaborate hidden tricks

YouTube’s history of Easter eggs is even more confusing because many of its most famous tricks were temporary experiments from the early 2010s.

A large number were introduced around YouTube’s Geek Week in 2013, when the platform embraced gaming, science fiction and internet fandom culture.

Those effects were real.

Most are no longer available.

“Use the Force, Luke” was real, but it does not belong on a current list

During the Geek Week era, searching YouTube for “Use the Force, Luke” caused the search results to behave as though they were being manipulated by the Force from Star Wars.

Page elements appeared to float and react to movement.

It was exactly the kind of playful browser experiment YouTube frequently introduced during that period.

It has since been retired.

If you type the phrase into YouTube in 2026, you should not expect the old interactive effect.

“Beam Me Up, Scotty” was another retired Geek Week trick

YouTube also created a Star Trek-inspired Easter egg around the phrase “Beam Me Up, Scotty”.

Search results appeared using an effect inspired by the transporter technology from the franchise.

Like the Star Wars Easter egg, it belonged to YouTube’s 2013 Geek Week and was never intended to become a permanent feature.

It no longer works as the original Easter egg.

Typing “1980” did not turn YouTube into a VHS player

This is another frequently repeated piece of incorrect internet trivia.

The old YouTube “1980” Easter egg was real, but it did not simply place a VHS filter over the video.

During Geek Week in 2013, typing 1980 while watching a video launched a version of the classic arcade game Missile Command.

Missiles began attacking the video and viewers had to defend it.

Failing to stop the attack could result in the on-screen video becoming damaged.

It was one of YouTube’s most creative Easter eggs, effectively turning the video player into part of a game.

The feature has since been removed.

The Doge YouTube effect is also gone

During the height of Doge meme culture, searching YouTube for “doge meme” changed elements of the results page into colourful Comic Sans-style text inspired by the meme.

It was wonderfully appropriate for its particular period of internet history.

It was also temporary.

The effect has long since been removed from YouTube.

Anyone following old instructions in 2026 will simply receive ordinary search results related to Doge.

The famous rainbow progress bar has had an uncertain afterlife

One of YouTube’s better-known tricks involved typing “awesome” while watching a video on desktop.

The player controls and progress bar could begin flashing through multiple colours, with typing the word again switching the effect off.

Unlike the old Geek Week features, this Easter egg survived in various forms for considerably longer.

However, changes to YouTube’s player have made its behaviour inconsistent, and users have reported that it does not reliably affect the modern progress bar.

It is therefore better treated as a historical or inconsistent feature rather than something guaranteed to work across YouTube in 2026.

The Konami Code is another piece of outdated YouTube advice

Many older articles claim that entering the famous Konami Code on YouTube produces a special rainbow animation.

YouTube has experimented with keyboard-based Easter eggs over the years, and versions of these tricks have appeared and disappeared as the site changed.

The classic instruction to press up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A should not be presented as a reliable current YouTube Easter egg in 2026.

The modern site and video player bear very little resemblance to the versions on which many of these old tricks originally appeared.

YouTube’s Technoblade tribute still survives

One of the more meaningful YouTube Easter eggs still visible in 2026 relates to Minecraft creator Technoblade, who died in 2022.

Searching YouTube for “technoblade” can produce the suggestion:

“Did you mean: technoblade never dies”

The message references one of the creator’s best-known phrases and functions as a small tribute within YouTube Search.

Unlike many of the famous Geek Week experiments, the Technoblade Easter egg has continued to survive years after it was introduced.

It is a good example of how YouTube’s modern hidden details have shifted away from elaborate page animations towards smaller cultural references.

YouTube still creates temporary Easter eggs for special events

The disappearance of older Easter eggs does not mean YouTube has stopped experimenting.

For YouTube’s 20th birthday in April 2025, the company introduced several temporary celebrations across the platform. On desktop, typing “bday” on selected watch pages produced a nostalgic surprise, while some videos received special birthday-themed animations and progress-bar designs.

YouTube has also used customised player graphics, logos and interactive details for major entertainment and cultural events.

These modern Easter eggs are often deliberately temporary.

Rather than leaving a hidden feature active for a decade, YouTube increasingly uses them as small event-specific surprises.

Even YouTube’s robots.txt file contains a joke

Not every Easter egg requires clicking or typing a secret phrase.

YouTube’s robots.txt file, the technical file websites use to provide instructions to automated web crawlers, has historically contained a joke claiming that it was created in the distant future after a robotic uprising had wiped out humanity.

It is exactly the kind of detail almost no ordinary YouTube visitor would ever encounter.

That also makes it a much more traditional Easter egg than many promotional effects. It exists primarily for the small number of people curious enough to look somewhere they were never expected to visit.

Chrome’s dinosaur deserves an honorary mention

Although it belongs to Google Chrome rather than Google Search or YouTube, no discussion of Google’s hidden games feels complete without the dinosaur.

When Chrome cannot connect to the internet, users see the familiar pixelated T-Rex.

Pressing the space bar on desktop or tapping the dinosaur on mobile launches a simple endless-running game in which the dinosaur jumps over cacti and avoids other obstacles.

The game was introduced in 2014 and became so popular that many users deliberately disconnect from the internet just to play it.

It is not technically an Easter egg in Google Search, but it may be Google’s most famous hidden game.

Why so many Easter egg lists are wrong

The biggest problem with lists of Google and YouTube Easter eggs is that the internet rarely forgets instructions after the feature itself disappears.

An article published in 2013 may still appear in search results in 2026.

The instructions remain visible, screenshots survive and other websites copy the information into newer articles without checking whether the feature actually works.

That is how retired tricks such as Zerg Rush, Atari Breakout, “Use the Force, Luke”, “Beam Me Up, Scotty” and YouTube’s Missile Command continue to be described as though they are still hidden somewhere waiting to be discovered.

There is also confusion between genuine Easter eggs and fan-made recreations. Google Gravity is perhaps the best example because it has been associated with Google for so long that many people assume the company created it.

It did not.

The internet’s hidden jokes have become part of its history

There was something particularly charming about the era when searching the right words could suddenly cause an entire webpage to behave strangely.

Google and YouTube still introduce playful features, but many of the grander browser-based Easter eggs belong to an earlier period of the web when interfaces were less standardised and companies seemed more willing to hide completely unnecessary experiments inside them.

Fortunately, not all of them have disappeared.

You can still make Google perform a barrel roll, deliberately tilt the search page, get trapped in a recursion joke or revisit playable Google Doodles such as PAC-MAN.

YouTube still contains occasional hidden references and continues introducing temporary surprises for anniversaries, fandoms and major events.

The difference in 2026 is that finding an Easter egg sometimes requires knowing not only where to look, but also whether the Easter egg still exists.

And perhaps that makes discovering one that genuinely works just a little more satisfying.