Why Google Added a Taylor Swift Easter Egg to Its Most Searched Doodle Game

Alex Weprin
·2 min read
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If you played around with Google’s “Most Searched Playground” game, you may have stumbled on a surprise: A treasure hunt (Taylor’s Version).

The search engine’s interactive Google Doodle featured an interactive element, letting users hunt around for the most searched people, places and things of the last 25 years. “It’s a bit akin to Where’s Waldo, but it’s got about 1700 unique figures in it,” says KK Walker, executive creative director of the Google Brand Studio.

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But users quickly discovered that there was more to the puzzle: A special Taylor Swift-themed treasure hunt, with 10 secret clues, based on Swift’s music. Swift was Google’s most searched songwriter of the last 25 years.

Swifties pounced at the challenge, with Reddit threads, YouTube videos and TikToks all working to find the clues and unlock the secret puzzle at the end (if you want a spoiler, it’s at the bottom of this story).

“It’s sort of Taylor Swift’s year, we’re just kind of all living in it at this point, Walker says, noting that Swift’s own love of Easter Eggs inspired the team to create the Swift-themed challenge.

“I think what is really interesting about the way that her fans engage with her music, her lyrics, any sort of move that she makes, it’s pretty unbelievable and they’re deeply engaged, which is not so far from what I think Google likes to do with our own history of Easter eggs,” Walker says. “And of course, with her history of Easter eggs, this felt like kind of the perfect moment to take a deeply engaged fandom and do something really playful and honor this most searched songwriter.”

Swifties quickly discovered all the clues hidden in the puzzle (from a tray of champagne flutes to seagulls flying on the edge of the map), with users receiving a letter after the found all of them. The Google most searched video, which includes a mention of Swift, contained another clue that unlocked a password to a special website.

“Things from the doodle will inevitably connect to something that could be potentially hidden in the film that will send you to something where you can learn much more about the most searched songwriter, and the only way to do it is for people to share what they’re actually finding in the doodle to uncover a secret message,” Walker says. “I think it seems really impossible. I’ve been told it’s going to be figured out in like 10 seconds.”

Indeed, as of Wednesday morning YouTube videos, online forums and Taylor Swift TikTok fan accounts all had step by step instructions for unlocking the secret: A special video featuring home movies from Swift, and a detailed look at some of the most searched songs, albums and performances from the singer-songwriter.

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