Google is celebrating Holi, the festival of colours, with a special ‘easter egg’ on its search results page for smartphones as well as the desktop website. All you have to do is search for the word ‘Holi’ or ‘Holi festival’, and then click or tap the image of three bowls of colour that appear in the info card in the sidebar. You will be able to spread some festive colour all over the page by clicking or tapping around anywhere. Random bursts of colour will be splashed wherever you like, and if you run out of space you can just keep scrolling down – the entire page is your canvas to play with. Google’s trademark minimal aesthetic with loads of white space is of course the perfect background on which to splash plenty of colour.
Search results won’t be clickable while you’re playing with this special Holi easter egg. Once you’re done with the festive cheer, just click the water drop icon that appears on the page to clear your artistic expressions and return to the standard view.
The Google Holi easter egg works across the web and mobile browser search pages as well as within the Google search app for iOS and Android.
This is not the first time that Google has rolled out fun little modifications to its pages and apps to celebrate Holi. The company regularly features customised Google Doodle logos on major festival and event days. This year, the Google Search homepage does not have a Google Doodle, but the three bowls of colour appear right below the search field, and take users directly to the search results page where this year’s easter egg can be activated.
In 2019, Google had rolled out Holi-themed effects for its Duo video calling app. This allowed users to add colour splashes, filters, and borders to their video streams. As far back as 2014, Google had marked the festival with a special themed Google Doodle. Other notable recent Google easter eggs have been introduced to celebrate the Wimbledon tennis tournament, the release of Avengers: Endgame, and the 30th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. The Holi 2020 Google easter egg was spotted by 9to5Google.