Google: The Fishing Easter Egg

If a Google search returns nothing, look closer. Buried on Google's "no results found" page is a tiny cartoon Yeti, sat on the ice with a fishing rod. Click him and he yanks something — a fish, a tyre, an old boot — out of the hole and drops it in his bucket. Wait a moment without clicking and he hums to himself. It is, as Easter eggs go, deeply unproductive and quietly charming.

How to trigger it

Go to google.com and search for a string that doesn't exist anywhere on the indexed web. The longer and more random, the better — a smash of letters and digits is reliable. If Google can't find a single result, the empty-state page renders, and the Yeti appears in the centre. Click him to start fishing. Each click pulls a different random object.

It doesn't always show. The egg is intermittent across browsers and devices — some sessions get the Yeti, some get a plain "Your search did not match any documents" message. Reports suggest it's more reliable in private/incognito windows than in pinned profiles where Google's UI experiments lean conservative.

What it actually is

It's a fragment of empty-state design dressed up as a delight loop. Google's no-results page is unusually low-traffic — most queries return at least something — so the team has historically used it as a sandbox for personality. The fishing Yeti is one of several such treatments that have appeared and disappeared over the years.

There's no documented spec, no announcement, no support page. The animation was spotted in the wild and has stayed in (or near) production ever since, with occasional UI tweaks and the odd disappearance.

Why anyone cares

Easter eggs in search are a window into how a search engine thinks about its own surface. Google has historically used them as press-friendly proof that the people building search still have fun at work — the askew tilt for tilt, the barrel roll for do a barrel roll, the recursive loop for recursion. None of them are load-bearing for ranking. All of them are load-bearing for vibes.

The fishing Yeti also quietly settles an old argument inside Google: whether the no-results page should feel like a dead end or like a small invitation to try again. The Yeti is the latter answer.

---

Cited in Wikipedia

This page is referenced on the Wikipedia article List of Google Easter eggs as the source for the fishing Yeti entry.

Originally published February 2022. Updated 2026 with current behaviour notes.