I wonder what the process is, as a google engineer, to get the artwork done for something like this? Do you just put in a ticket and some time later the SVGs turn up in your repo? Is there an artwork queue, or is it a political fight for access to the illustrators time?
Hmm, when did this appear? That's got to be pretty irritating if you run a solitaire site to earn a living from the ad revenue. (I have a friend who does this - not the World of Solitaire guy, although fair play to him because he has almost every variant known to humankind on there.)
Like Windows subsuming all useful third party utilities into Windows itself? If Google really went all in on these sort of search based functions, it could provide an angle of attack for DOJ/EU.
Well, yeah, that's sort of the line I'm thinking along.
90% it's engineers doing something they think is cool/kooky/funky without thinking about the consequences. As in, you know those top two sites have taken a hit on revenue because someone on a fat salary at Google wanted to do something cool with their 20% time, or some similar story.
But there's always this 10% suspicion, which is perhaps amplified by the controversy around AMP - and maybe it's a little bit unfair - that they ultimately never want you to leave the Google site.
That may be the case but, even if it's not, they do this stuff that they think is cool, but they do it without any sense of responsibility or empathy.
That solitaire game is a fairly limited implementation - admittedly rather a nice one - and it lacks a lot of the variants, and other bells and whistles of the top solitaire sites. Nevertheless it's going to be up there for all time, stealing traffic from and reducing the revenue to those other sites, and it won't make a jot of difference either way to Google.
I run World of Solitaire, currently #1 Google result for the solitaire search term. I haven't noticed any measurable change in traffic to my site since they put this up. Probably because folks can get a much better experience on my site compared to the mini version they created. Maybe simpler website with tools such as spinners, randomizers, etc may see more of an impact.
Well that's good to know at any rate, and I imagine people who've already used your site will go back to it rather than play Google's simple version, but I wonder if longer-term it'll mean a drop in organic traffic? Time will tell, I suppose.
It's interesting that of all these bits of functionality being posted... none of them share the same UI. Seems oddly in-consistent (seeing as its part of Search - their core product - and it wouldn't be an insanely complex task to rectify).
Although I know its much easier for me to say that as a non-Googler than it may actually be :p
I guessed, and was pleasantly surprised recently when I searched "flip a coin". Had to decide where to go to dinner and flipping a virtual coin did just fine
Lemme get this straight: they're already collecting all my personal data and browsing history, and now they want my RANDOM NUMBERS too?? No way. #myrandint
Just add a 1 to the end of any number you generate with their servers. That should delay the government long enough that you can escape with the Zip disk. (You know the one)
I love that feature. But my go-to dice roller is just "rolldice" on the command line. rolldice 2d6, rolldice 3d20, whatever it is, very useful. I use it to generate little worlds to draw, things like that.
It solely seems to depend on the Google user language settings. Works for both the Canadian and German Google with the language set to "English". One gets what one would expect (with "spinner" roughly translating to "idiot") when trying this with the German Google set to German.
I am so curious about how these relatively simple easter eggs work behind the scenes. How are they incorporated into the core search repo? Surely the guys in charge of that beast aren't allowing these things anywhere near the core code of the GOOG empire.
Google should figure out a way to better expose the features of their web services. Most often we seem to find out about a Google feature by chance alone.
The links people have dropped here are a hoot...but the first thing I thought of from the headline was the old Spinner music service that got bought out by Netscape, ages ago.
No, because that would be cheating. Once you start the spin (you can pull it back to get a good start!), you can't just stop it where ever you'd like. "Wheel of fortune" rules apply here.
https://www.google.com/search?q=roll%20dice
https://www.google.com/search?q=random%20number%20between%20...
Probably fairly easy for engineers to add these