Google's Ocarina of Time Easter egg is a link to a past when Search wasn't horrible

Turn the clock back to 1998 ahead of Nintendo's remake of the classic Zelda game.

Nintendo

Nintendo's remake of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is out this week and Google Search is marking the occasion with an appropriate Easter egg. If you search for "Zelda" or "Ocarina of Time," you'll see an animation of the Master Sword pop up in the corner. Click or tap on this and a loading screen of sorts that features a Triforce will take over the tab for a moment.

After that animation clears, the search results will look like they're from 1998, the year that the original version of Ocarina of Time debuted on the Nintendo 64. You'll see blue hyperlinks to relevant webpages and brief excerpts from them, listed in order of apparent relevance, which is how a search engine is supposed to work. The classic "I'm Feeling Lucky" button that takes you to a random page is there too.

Unfortunately, this Easter egg only seems to work for searches related to the game. Looking up something else takes you back to the current, far worse Search results page. This is an Easter egg that's supposed to invoke nostalgia, though it's doing that in a way that Google perhaps didn't intend. 

All it's really doing is reminding me of a time before Google made Search so much worse, from packing the results with ads to eventually foisting AI Mode and AI Overviews upon everyone. (Google said last week AI Mode is having an impact on how much it makes from ads in traditional Search. Its solution to eating its own lunch? More ads in AI Mode.)

There is a way to have more of a traditional Search experience on Google if you'd prefer not to decamp to an alternative search engine. If you click on the Web tab on a Google Search results page, you'll see actual webpages that are relevant to your query with none of the AI Overview cruft. You can set things up in your browser so that this is your default Google experience as well. The aptly named TenBlueLinks has easy-to-follow guides on how to do that.