Google has hidden an Easter egg on its webpage for users who search for cats and dogs – and people have been sharing their delight for it all over social media
Google is known for its Doodles – but they’re not the only surprise the search engine makes for its users. Eagle-eyed internet users have spotted a Google Easter egg hidden on its web results when you search for cats and dogs.
With a simple search for ‘dogs’, you will be presented with a webpage with a purple button next to the word ‘Dogs’. When clicking on this, you’ll see a paw stretch across your screen to leave a pawprint behind. Then, wherever you click on the webpage, more pawprints will appear until you click the ‘X’ at the bottom of the screen.
Every time you click on your screen, you’ll also hear a small bark. The exact same thing happens when searching ‘cats’ – but with a meow is played with each click rather than a bark. After making this discovery, TikTok user @hiddengoogledetails shared the revelation with his almost 500,000 followers – receiving thanks in the comment section.
One impressed user said: “The dogs are so cute.” Another user said: “Filled my whole screen with the pawprints.” A third user said: “I did it and it was cute.” One more user added: “This also works with cats.”
It comes after people shared their amazement after learning what Google actually stands for after all of these years. Founded by computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin in September 1998, Google completely transformed how people use the internet.
Today, you’ll commonly hear people use the phrase ‘I Googled it’ in conversation when sharing how they came to know a certain piece of knowledge. But the brand is much more than a search engine as the company also operates Gmail, YouTube, Workspace, as well as its own smartphone and watch brands – Pixel, Pixel Watch, and Fitbit.
But 26 years after its launch and one puzzled Quora user is asking: “Is Google an acronym?” It turns out the name Google is a misspelling of Googol – the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. This name was picked to reflect Larry and Sergey’s mission “to organise the world ’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
Prior to this, the search engine was referred to as Backrub. A Google statement reads: “The Google story begins in 1995 at Stanford University. Larry Page was considering Stanford for grad school and Sergey Brin, a student there, was assigned to show him around.
“By some accounts, they disagreed about nearly everything during that first meeting, but by the following year, they struck a partnership. Working from their dorm rooms, they built a search engine that used links to determine the importance of individual pages on the World Wide Web. They called this search engine Backrub. Soon after, Backrub was renamed Google (phew). “
Despite this, some internet users argue Google stands for ‘Global Organisation of Oriented Group Language of Earth’. However, this is considered to be false information due to the lack of evidence around the theory.
Commenting on the Quora user’s post, one social media user said: “The name was chosen to signify the vast amount of information that the search engine can access. It is not an acronym formed from the initials of words.” Another user added: “Google doesn’t have any full form [but] many in the world assume and say Google stands for ‘Global Organization of Oriented Language Experts’.”
