Google’s cashing in on the nostalgia reawakened by the Ocarina of Time remake. If you type “zelda” into the Google search bar, you’ll get a glowing, hovering Master Sword in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. Click it, and the browser transports you and the search engine back in time to 1998, when everything was good and nothing hurt, or at least when it wasn’t an absolute pain in the ass to try to find something via Google.
The Google page is bedecked in its old livery: the bygone logo with the exclamation mark, along with old blue links in Times New Roman-ish font and listed, blessedly, in order of importance and relevance. No AI search results, no pesky shopping links, no ads. It’s a big ol’ beacon reminding you of a time when the web held the promise of unlimited information at your fingertips, and wasn’t yet the enshittified, barely ethical infomercial it has become. All for a little “Zelda” joke.
It’s not just “zelda” that’ll get you the nostalgia easter egg. “Ocarina of Time” will get you there too. It’s actually quite funny that Google’s reminding us now of the time when it didn’t suck. Last week, Google lost $475 billion in stock market value, the company’s worst-performing day on the stock market ever, with analysts noting that it had missed its ad revenue targets. The reason: Its own AI search product was eating into that ad revenue. Maybe Google should make the Zelda easter egg last a little longer.
