• How can you make Google everything on your screen with a Starcraft reference?
What Youtube searches will start hitting you with memes before you even open a video?
These are 15 of the craziest secrets on YouTube and Google.
15 – Creating GIFs from Youtube Videos • Obviously, you enjoy watching YouTube
videos, right?
• Well, have you ever just wanted to take a clip of a video and turn it into a GIF,
so you can paste into whatever Facebook comments you feel like?
• Just type in the letters “gif” before “youtube” when you’re watching a video,
and you’ll be taken to an editor where you can cut the YouTube clip into whatever GIF
section you like.
14 – Play Pac-Man • This was a Google Doodle a few years ago,
where Google celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of Pac-Man by building a game of Pac-Man right
in the website.
• The game used the Google logo as a map, rather than the standard layout.
• The game is still accessible at http://elgoog.im/pacman/, and can even be played with two players – one
using arrow keys, and one using WASD. 13 – Navigate YouTube on PC with No Mouse
• If you’re watching YouTube on your TV, maybe you don’t really want to have to use
your computer mouse to control it.
• No problem.
Head to youtube.com/leanback to get a version of YouTube completely controlled by keyboard.
It autoplays plays videos back-to-back without a delay so you don’t have to keep selecting
them.
• The idea is to make YouTube just sort of work on its own, like it’s a TV channel.
12 – LMGTFY • You know those times when someone asks
you a question that you could easily have Googled in less time than it took them to
ask you?
• By using “Let Me Google That For You,” you can sarcastically send that person the
answer to that question by showing them how easy it is to just find the answer themselves.
11 – Doge Meme • Doge is pretty damn close to being a dead
meme, but don’t tell Youtube that.
• If you search “doge meme” in Youtube right now, you’ll get a results screen full
of broken English in colourful Comic Sans. 10 – Google Search Game Commands
• Okay, so you’re sitting down to play a board game or something, and it turns out
you’re missing a piece.
• You can tell Google to “roll dice,” “flip a coin,” or even give you a spinner
with between 2 and 20 spaces.
• You can also tell it to spin a dreidel, or just pull up a random number generator.
9 – YouTube Does the Harlem Shake • Back in 2013, basically every person in
the world made a “Harlem Shake” video.
• Now if you type “do the Harlem Shake” into YouTube, the music from the Harlem Shake
video will play, and everything on the screen will dance along with it.
8 – Test Your Geography Knowledge • Google Maps has a built-in game called
“smartypins.”
• It’s a trivia game in which you answer the questions by placing pins on the map in
the correct location.
Guess wrong, and you lose a certain number of miles based on how far your pin was from
the right answer.
• Answer as many questions as you can before you run out of miles.
7 – Keyboard Controls for Playback • This is one of the better-known tricks
on Youtube, but it’s still a good one.
If you’re watching Youtube on a PC, your keyboard actually has a lot of different functions.
• Some of the more common shortcuts are using the spacebar to pause, and the left
and right keys to go forward and backward 5 seconds at a time.
• But did you know you can also use the 1 though 9 number keys to skip to the 10 percent
to 90 percent intervals in the video?
Or that you can use the period and comma keys while the video is paused to move forward
and backward just a single frame at a time?
6 – Running Dinosaur in Google Chrome • If you use Google Chrome, chances are
you’ve seen the “lonely dinosaur,” the icon that lets you know your internet connection
has screwed you over yet again.
• But if you’d like to have a little fun before trying to figure out how to fix it,
hit the space bar.
The dinosaur will jump, starting a little game where your T-rex has to jump over cactuses
and pterodactyls. 5 – Change Playback Speeds
• It’s a rarely-used option, but it’s right there in the settings – you can make
your videos run faster or slower simply by adjusting the speed.
• The question is, why?
There are a few different uses for this.
You can give your music a different feel by speeding or slowing it, or you can get through
your videos a bit faster.
• Kicking your videos up to 1.25 speed doesn’t make it seem that much faster, but you can
watch a 30-minute video in 24 minutes.
4 – Playing Guitar • One of the more elaborate Google Doodles
was turning the company logo into a full guitar to play with your mouse.
• It was introduced in 2009 for what would have been the 96th birthday of Les Paul.
• Obviously, it isn’t headlining the front page of Google anymore, but you can still
find it, complete with instructions for how to play a bunch of different popular songs.
It can also record your tracks.
3 – Use the Force • There’s another Easter egg you can try
out when searching YouTube videos.
• Type in “Use the Force Luke,” and you can control the results screen with Force
powers.
• Okay, it’s actually just by moving your mouse around.
But still.
It’s like the Force.
2 – Zerg Rush • Google’s not above making a good Starcraft
reference.
• Search “Zerg Rush” to a Google search, and you’ll find your search results attacked
by an endless swarm of Google “O’s.”
• You have to click the “O’s to destroy them, but they’ll eventually overrun the
screen, after which point they’ll gather to spell out, “GG.”
1 – Google Gravity • Ever wanted to just play around with the
Google homepage by just flinging buttons around?
• Google Gravity is an Easter Egg where the entire menu just collapses.
Afterwards, you can just grab things with your mouse and fling them around.
• Google Space is basically the opposite – everything on the screen just starts floating
around as if it’s in zero-G.