Ben Madilynn
Google is renowned for its Doodles, but they’re not the only surprises the tech giant has in store for its users.
Sharp-eyed internet surfers have discovered a hidden Google Easter egg on its search results when you look up cats and dogs.
A simple ‘dogs’ search will present you with a webpage featuring a purple button next to the word ‘Dogs’.
Clicking this reveals a paw stretching across your screen, leaving behind a pawprint. More pawprints appear wherever you click on the webpage until you hit the ‘X’ at the bottom of the screen. Each click also triggers a small bark.
The same thing happens when you search ‘cats’, but with a meow sound accompanying each click instead of a bark. TikTok user @hiddengoogledetails shared this discovery with his nearly 500,000 followers, earning gratitude in the comments section.
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One impressed user commented: “The dogs are so cute.” While another said: “Filled my whole screen with the pawprints.”
A third chimed in: “I did it and it was cute.” While someone else adsaided: “This also works with cats.”
This comes after people expressed their surprise upon learning what Google actually stands for. Founded by computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin in September 1998, Google revolutionised the way people use the internet.
The phrase ‘I Googled it’ is now commonplace in conversations where people describe how they found information, underlining Google’s presence in everyday life. But the company’s reach extends far beyond its ubiquitous search engine prowess; it encompasses services such as Gmail, YouTube, Workspace, and hardware like the Pixel smartphone, Pixel Watch, and Fitbit.
Twenty-six years since Google’s inception, curiosity has led one Quora user to ask: “Is Google an acronym? ” It appears that the answer is tied to a creative twist in spelling—Google is a play on ‘Googol’, a term for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros, aligning with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s vision “to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”.
Before receiving its current name, the search engine was known as Backrub. The tale of Google began in 1995 at Stanford University when Larry Page contemplated grad school there, and met Sergey Brin, a student tasked with guiding him around campus.
Although their initial interaction was marked by disagreements on various topics, within a year, they formed a partnership. From their dormitory accommodation, they developed a search engine that ranked web pages based on the web’s link structure.
Initially dubbed Backrub, the duo later abandoned this moniker in favor of Google (and quite rightly too). A statement from Google encapsulates its origins: “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).”
Some people online suggest that Google represents ‘Global Organisation of Oriented Group Language of Earth’, but this is widely discredited as a misconception because there’s no solid proof supporting the claim. A commenter on a Quora discussion debunked the theory by stating: “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.”
Further dispelling the myth, another individual remarked: “Google doesn’t have any full form [but] many in the world assume and say Google stands for ‘Global Organization of Oriented Language Experts’.”
