What do president Obama, Paris Hilton, and Tupac have in common?

Barack Obama and Tom Hanks appeared in “The Road We’ve Traveled.”

Tom Hanks and Kevin Bacon appeared in “Apollo 13.”

Paris Hilton and Steve Carell appeared in “American Breakdown.”

Steve Carell and Kevin Bacon appeared in “Crazy, Stupid, Love.”

Tupac Shakur and Demi Moore appeared in “Nothing But Trouble.”

Demi Moore and Kevin Bacon appeared in “A Few Good Men.”

Barack Obama, Paris Hilton, and Tupac Shakur all share a “Bacon Number” of 2.

Bacon Number

No doubt more than a few of you out there have killed some time on the latest iteration of the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, released by Google last week. Enter “Bacon Number” in the search field followed by any celebrity name and your first result will be that celebrity’s Bacon Number.

The game, born in the ’90’s, is a play on the concept that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else by six or fewer relationships and was supposedly inspired by a comment Bacon made in an interview – that he’s worked with everyone in Hollywood or knows someone who has worked with them. The game has been a book, a board game, was eventually embraced by Kevin Bacon himself who started the charitable organization sixdegrees.org and now is one of Google’s clever little search tricks.

It may take a few tries to find anyone with a Bacon Number higher than 2 or 3. Perhaps Mr. Bacon really HAS worked with everyone in Hollywood.

Here are some other oldie but goodie Google “Easter eggs”

TILT
Type “tilt” or “askew” into your search field.

Tilt

ZERG RUSH
Enter “zerg rush” (a nod to the aliens from the video game StarCraft) as your search and try to stop the O’s from destroying your search results.

Zerg Rush

RECURSION
Type recursion into the search field and Google asks “did you mean recursion” in a nerdy joke giving you the same search results again and again.