Google loves delighting their users, from including a fully functioning Pacman game as the Google Doodle, or giving you a coin to flip when you need to make a decision, there’s moments of delight waiting around every corner. Today, Google is adding to the list, bringing Solitaire and Noughts and Crosses to Google Search.
Bringing up the games in search results is as simple as searching ‘Solitaire‘ (no, unfortunately ‘Patience’ doesn’t work), or ‘Tic Tac Toe‘ (Yes, you can even search ‘Noughts and Crosses‘). The games come up whether you search on mobile or desktop
Tic Tac Toe lets you select your difficulty from three settings – easy, medium or impossible – or you can play the ultimate enemy…a friend! Your score is kept so you can play for bragging rights – or whatever stakes you want to arrange offline.
As Stephen Cognetta, Associate Product Manager at Google says, ‘Search is for so much more than research and practical matters — it’s for fun, too!’ and Google knows a lot about fun, that’s for sure.
Google has been hiding fun Google Search tricks, or easter eggs in search over the last few years. Normally Google doesn’t announce these tricks, instead waiting for users to find them naturally. Easter eggs found so far include searching ‘Do a barrel roll‘ or ‘askew‘ each of which cause the browser to perform a trick, others like ‘Bletchley Park‘ show the name being decoded in the knowledge graph.
There’s hours of entertainment in these new games – more than one IT department has spent time removing Windows Solitaire game from the Standard Operating Environment (SOE), a move that this inclusion effectively negates in one fell swoop. The games are now live in Google Search, so try them out right now.
