Your own name, spelled wrong, in a mirror
The logo says elgoog. Everything else on the page has been flipped along its vertical axis, so the search box opens on the right, the text runs the wrong way, and your cursor moves left when you push the mouse right. That last part is what breaks people.
Typing still works. It just arrives backwards. Put in your name and watch it come out inside out, letter by letter, in the field you’re looking at.
What stays usable
Reading. Slowly, and with your head tilted, but a surprising number of people get fluent inside two minutes.
What falls apart
Anything involving the mouse. Clicking a specific word is genuinely hard when your hand is moving the opposite direction to the pointer.
The reading test
There’s a short challenge built into the controls: a handful of reversed words, timed. Nobody clears it first try. Most people are down to under ten seconds by the fourth attempt, which is a faster learning curve than you’d guess.
Why elgoog and not just a filter
A CSS flip would mirror the pixels and stop there. This one flips the text content too, so what’s on screen is a real string you could copy out. The distinction matters if you’ve ever tried to screenshot it and read the result later.
Other ways to break the same page
Mirroring is the tidy version of what a lot of these tricks do. askew google rotates instead of reflecting, only about nine degrees, enough that your neck notices before your brain does. do a barrel roll spins the page a full turn and puts it back exactly where it was.
Somebody eventually built zerg rush google mirror, which runs the swarm attack on a reversed page, so you’re clicking backwards at things that are eating your results. It is much harder than it sounds.
For a page that stops obeying you in a different way, google gravity drops the interface into a heap at the bottom. google underwater search floats it instead. Neither cares which direction your text is running.