The web's best 'easter eggs'

One of the greatest elements of a quality website is something purposefully designed so that 95 percent of your audience will never get to enjoy it. Web designers calls these secret flourishes "easter eggs."

Webware just published a fun list of the 10 best Internet Easter eggs, hidden features on Google, Yahoo, and other sites that you've been to a hundred of times but probably never noticed these little, hidden quirks. Here's a taste:

The No. 2 pick was Yahoo's secret yodel. You can still relive that classic "Yahoooooo-oo!" call from the company's early commercials. Head to Yahoo.com and click on the ! at the end of the banner logo. You might want to turn down the volume first (I startled a coworker when I tested this one).

No. 4 was Google bombs. These are stunts where people conspire to use a search engine's code against itself. The common example: in 2004, several websites tricked Google's algorithm into thinking that a good search result for "miserable failure" would be President Bush's White House profile. This practical joke no longer works on Google, but it's still the top result when you do the search in Yahoo.

A more humorous iteration exists using Google's built-in calculator in relation to Douglas Adams' masterpiece The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Searching for "the answer to life, the universe, and everything" yields 42, which you'd understand if you had read the book.

Coming in at No. 7 was Flickr.com's brush with Pirate speak. In honor of last year's "international talk like a pirate day," Yahoo's photo-sharing site posted a special new language option. You could toggle between English, Español, Français, or (for that day only), "Arrr!"

Clicking it would convert nearly everything on the site into pirate-jargon. Expect the folks at Yahoo to do it again come September 19th matey.

Here's the link for Webware's full top 10 list.