Google's latest Internet Easter egg has a holiday theme. Even if you're living in a warmer climate, the search engine giant is making it snow.
Typing "let it snow" into Google.com will return the normal search engine results for YouTube videos of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra singing the classic song. But then, a few snowflakes will start falling from the top of the screen until all the search results are obscured by a digital blizzard.
Once the page is completely full of snow, you can "draw" on the screen with your mouse. Clicking the "defrost" button will bring up the search results once again, but snowflakes will continue to fall in the background.
To see the snowy results, don't put quote marks around the phrase. The trick does not appear to work on mobile devices; nothing fancy from an iPhone 4 running iOS 5 (Update: One reader reported that it works on her iPad. Others, however, are having difficulties in particular browsers, like IE9.)
Google Easter eggs made headlines in early November with the "barrel roll" trick. Search for the phrase "do a barrel roll" and your results will do a 360-degree flip before settling down. You can also perform the same spinning motion when you do a Google search for "ZZ" or "RR"—a reference to Nintendo's classic video game Star Fox 64.
As PCMag reported last year, there's a hidden world of harmless pranks coded just beneath the surface of many popular Web sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Google; undocumented tricks to entertain and amuse. Click on the slideshow below for 12 Easter Eggs and share more in the comments below.
You can also enjoy other Google Search Easter eggs by typing in "anagram," which shows "Did you mean: nag a ram"; "ascii art" turns the Google logo into ASCII art; and searching for "recursion" shows "Did you mean: recursion" which recursively runs searches for "recursion." Similarly, searching for the word "tilt" will produce some crooked results.