Google Search – How to Search for ‘Do a Barrel Roll’ Without Triggering It

google-search

My brother and I used to play Star Fox 64 when we were kids, and when we did dog fights, we always loved doing barrel rolls

Barrel Roll

so I decided to search for the quote that they always said the game in tutorial. So I start typing

"do a"

and well Google started auto-completing it for me. That's good so before I move to the suggested item Google decides it is going to make me sick.

Google: don't do a barrel roll

I know Easter eggs are all good and great but now I am afraid for when I need to search Google that something happens unexpectedly. I didn't even type in the full query. I just want to search Google.. you know without all the fireworks and barrel rolls.

I love Google Search so is there an option/extension to stop these features?

Best Answer

You can avoid Google doing a barrel roll by encapsulating your query in quotation marks: "do a barrel roll" will not, ironically enough, do a barrel roll.

This should work for all easter egg queries: quotation marks signal to Google that it should search for the literal string instead of interpreting it to mean something else.

Compare:

This of course doesn't work when Google Instant is turned on, as Google will submit the search query before you can finish encapsulating the query in quotation marks. Unfortunately, this is a limitation/"feature" of Google Instant: to prevent Google from submitting the query before you're finished typing it, you'd have to disable Google Instant.

Beyond this, it's possible to disable certain types of Easter eggs, provided you know the nature of the Easter egg beforehand. You could, for instance, prevent the do a barrel roll Easter egg by adding the following snippet to your browser's custom stylesheet:

body {
  -webkit-animation-name: none;
  -moz-animation-name: none;
}

But since this would affect every <body> tag on every webpage, it's not ideal either.

You could get around this by using Stylish, which allows you to specify site-specific custom stylesheets ("userstyles"). Creating a userstyle with the following should work:

@-moz-document: domain("google.com")
@-webkit-document: domain("google.com")
@document: domain("google.com")

body {
  -webkit-animation-name: none;
  -moz-animation-name: none;
}

Of course, while this would allow you to disable this specific Easter egg, Google can and most likely will come up with new ones that do unexpected things in the name of being quirky. Without disabling JavaScript or Google Instant, it'd be nigh impossible to prevent them from happening at least once.

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