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Google's "Zerg rush" Easter egg game eats up search results

The battle of the Zergs is on, as Google installs a new Easter egg to waste millions of global productivity hours. Kill the rogue letters and stop them destroying your search results!
Written by Zack Whittaker, Contributor

If you thought you were being far too productive at work, Google's breakaway Easter egg game literally eats away at your search results, and the battle is on as you attempt to save the page from complete destruction.

Get started by heading to Google and typing in: "zerg rush".

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The game involves a series of letters in the company's name attacking en masse the search results. A green bar appears of the target the letters are attacking, and it is the users' job to click rapidly on each attacking letter before the bar drops down to red. The faster you click, the less damage the search results take.

Once you are done, you have the opportunity to post your score to Google+.

The name stems from a "rush", where forces suddenly attack an opponent in the hope of overrunning the player. The full name of the Easter egg is a hat-tip to the Zergs, an alien race in the strategy game Star Craft. (This was news to me; I had to ring up a gaming friend to ask about all this. "All work and no play makes Zack a dull boy," he said. How drôle.)

But Google may have inadvertently advertised a rival browser in the process. The red "O" looks vaguely like the Opera browser's logo, despite the letters used to attack the search results coming from the Google logo.

Opera tweeted this morning:

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Google's Chrome remains as one of the most popular browsers on the Web. In March, Chrome rose to become the world's top browser --- albeit for a day. Current trends show Chrome, while leaving Firefox behind in second place, could overtake Microsoft's Internet Explorer later this year, according to StatCounter.

Opera remains one of the most popular mobile browsers available, but has fallen behind thanks to Android's in-built browser. Its current global market share for the desktop however remains less than 3 percent.

Image credit: ZDNet/Google, Twitter.

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