Google Hacks

Google Mirror

If you want a different perspective on Google, check out the Google Mirror.

In the Internet sense, a “mirror” is a site that copies the content of another site. But there’s a Google mirror that is a mirror in the traditional sense; it is the image of Google, backward.

Antoni Chan’s Google Mirror (http://www.alltooflat.com/geeky/elgoog/), shown in Figure 7-5, copies Google’s main page with everything mirror-imaged, including the graphic. It’s a working search engine, too—you’ll need to enter your search backward too ;-). If you want to find “fred,” for example, you need to search for derf. Search results are mirrored as well, naturally.

In fact, just about every page you can visit on the regular Google site is mirrored here. You can read mirrored copies of Google’s press releases, jobs available (Figure 7-6), even backward copies of the official logos.

Figure 7-5. Antoni Chan’s Google Mirror

Figure 7-6. Google’s job page viewed through Google Mirror

The only thing I couldn’t do with the Google Mirror site was set the language options to something besides English. It looks as if the Google Mirror interface can’t accept the cookies Google requires to set language preferences. I figured that if reading English backwards was fun, reading “Bork Bork Bork!” (the Swedish Chef interface) ...