The Fidget Spinner Is Google’s Latest Easter Egg Distraction

I wasn’t above squeezing an occasional round of Doom in between study sessions in university, and am certainly not shy about catching some Pokemon if any are lurking in my office (that’s a no).

Image via Google

But if I have a particularly busy workday and want to kill 30 seconds before entering a meeting, or want to keep my attention focused during a meeting, Google has my back with some sweet search engine Easter eggs. They just added a new one. It rhymes with “digit sinner”.

Fidget Spinner

The latest edition to Google’s list of Easter eggs is the iconic fidget spinner, now digitised for your perpetually spinning pleasure. Searching for “spinner” and clicking the toy makes it spin in your browser window; you can spin it with your finger on your smartphone, too. There’s also the option to change the fidget spinner to a numerical spinning wheel if you need a random number from one to 20. You can’t modify any colours, but then again if it were any more interactive you’d probably waste even more time.

Tic-Tac-Toe

Enter “tic tac toe” for Google’s take on the two-person board game. You can futz with the three difficulty settings and, if you’re sitting next to an equally unproductive coworker, compete against them on the same machine in two-player mode.

Pac-man

Appearing as a Google doodle in 2010, searching for “Pac-man” will bring up a playable version of the game in your browser. Instead of the traditional layout of Pac-man games past, the field of play spells out, of course, Google.

Solitaire

I’m not exactly sure how Microsoft doesn’t have a patent on every implementation of the classic card game solitaire, but Google’s version (search for “solitaire”, of course) offers two difficulty settings as well as a timer, score, and number of moves made.