The city goes dark and you get a torch instead of a scrollbar
Search results are still there. You just can’t see them. The page drops to near black and a small circle of light follows your cursor, so reading anything means dragging the beam across it line by line like you’re searching a warehouse.
It’s obstructive on purpose and it makes people read things they’d normally skim, which is a strange side effect for a joke.
Case file Twelve results, each one a Gotham reference. Some of them are worth finding.
Beam width Fixed. You can’t widen it, which is the only reason the trick has any tension.
Skyline Bottom third of the frame, with a handful of lit windows that don’t move.
the signal itself
Second button. A beam climbs from the left edge of the skyline, and the bat mark fades onto the low cloud near the top of the frame. It doesn’t snap on; it takes most of a second, which is the difference between a projection and a sticker.
things to look for
The windows in the skyline aren’t random. There are eleven of them and they’re placed to suggest a shape if you unfocus your eyes, though half the people who look never see it and the other half insist it’s obvious.
The case files include a couple of things that read as ordinary until the torch is on them. Reading in the dark changes what you notice, which is presumably the joke.
turning it all off
Third button brings the lights back up. The signal fades before the darkness lifts, so there’s a half second where the page is visible and the bat mark is still hanging over it.
other tricks that mess with the lights
Darkness is a rare mechanic here. Most of these break the page by moving it. google gravity drops everything to the floor, thanos snap dusts half of it, and google black hole pulls the whole interface into a point until the screen is bare.
For a different kind of hidden layer, google matrix buries the search box under falling code you can still type through. grogu google keeps the lights on but lifts everything off the ground.