Easter Eggs

I know its a bit early to talk of Easter, but while reading the Google Blog I discovered two interesting things today:
- Google goes Democratic
- Bush says he uses Google - I wonder if he ever Googled 'failure' :-)

For those who don't know, the results of Googling 'failure' are a category of phenomena called Google Easter Eggs. In the context of software, an Easter Egg is a hidden feature or novelty that the programmers have put in their software. In general, it is any hidden, entertaining thing that a creator hides in their creation only for their own personal reasons. This can be anything from a hidden list of the developers, to hidden commands, to jokes, to funny animations.

Notably, like most other areas, Google has swayed from tradition in the area of Easter Eggs as well. Google Easter Eggs, especially the ones in its search engine are not hidden features deliberately programmed in it by its programmers, but random variations that occur due to the information that its 'crawler' software gathers while indexing the World Wide Web.

All Google products have Easter Eggs, but people find the ones with the search engine most interesting - and example is the End of the Internet!!

A very useful GMail Easter Egg
Gmail has an interesting quirk where you can add a plus sign (+) after your Gmail address, and it'll still get to your inbox. It's called plus-addressing, and it essentially gives you an unlimited number of e-mail addresses to play with.

Here's how it works: say your address is pinkyrocks@gmail.com, and you want to automatically label all work e-mails. Add a plus sign and a phrase to make it pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com and set up a filter to label it work (to access your filters go to Settings->Filters and create a filter for messages addressed to pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com. Then add the label work).

More real world examples
Find out who is spamming you: Be sure to use plus-addressing for every form you fill out online and give each site a different plus address.Example: You could usepinkyrocks+nytimes@gmail.com for nytimes.compinkyrocks+freestuff@gmail.com for freestuff.comThen you can tell which site has given your e-mail address to spammers, and automatically send them to the trash.

Automatically label your incoming mail: I've talked about that above.Archive your mail: If you receive periodic updates about your bank account balance or are subscribed to a lot of mailing lists that you don't check often, then you can send that sort of mail to the archives and bypass your Inbox.Example: For the mailing list, you could give pinkyrocks+mailinglist1@gmail.com as your address, and assign a filter that will archive mail to that address

Another GMail Easter Egg
People who have a dot (.) in their email address also get an alias without the dot. Example any mails to abracadabra@gmail.com would land into the mailbox abraca.dabra@gmail.com as well.

While this in itself is not that intriguing, the possibilities that might emerge are quite funny.
Consider two IDs – ramcharan.das@gmail.com and ram.charandas@gmail.com – both would due to the above feature have the same alias (ramcharandas@gmail.com). However, GMail has averted this possibility by not allowing creation of IDs with the same character sequences (after omission of the dot). I had tested this possibility and still maintain screenshots of my tests.

This further means that placing the dot (.) in a GMail ID at any position (in addition to the actual one) does not make any difference. Thus if your GMail ID has ‘n’ characters you can straightaway start using n aliases (1 alias without the dot, and n-1 aliases with different positions of the dot).

More Easter Eggs resources
1. Easter eggs on other Software
2. A whole site dedicated to Easter Eggs: http://www.eeggs.com/