‘Do a Barrel Roll’ Song Sweeps YouTube [AUDIO]

For those not keen on hashtags and trending topics, Do a Barrel Roll has been sweeping social networking sites for the past 36 hours.

Thanks to the behemoth Google, Do a Barrel Roll became one of the hottest search terms on its site, as individuals across the world wanted to see what exactly a barrel roll was.

Well, it proved to be yet another genius invention by the tech company that makes your computer screen spin upside down.

Go try it.

Pretty cool, huh?

Do a Barrel Roll is one of many (see: recursion, anagram, and ASCII art) Easter eggs that have quickly garnered worldwide fame over the past two days.

An Easter egg is an inside joke strategically implanted by the masterminds at Google. They produce sporadic ones, like the barrel roll, as well as an annual one on April Fool's Day.

Now, people are flocking to YouTube to hear the Do a Barrel Roll song.

So far, it has gotten 1.6 million hits and is even available as a ringtone download.

The 17-second clip features the Do a Barrel Roll song, a remix of a spoken line from Nintendo's Starfox 64. A catchy, albeit annoying, ditty with 80s-techno beats and the one simple lyric, do a barrel roll.

Some bloggers have said that Google's newest Easter egg is a tribute to the 1993 video game.

However, Google denies the correlation.

Today's fun query, 'do a barrel roll,' was created by a Google software engineer with the primary goal of entertaining users - while showcasing the power of CSS3, a presentation feature of modern browsers. The do a barrel roll query, which causes the search page to spin, will remain in place for a while, the company said in a statement to ABC News.

It was merely meant to put a little bit of whimsy into a monotonous day.

Coders have been doing this kind of thing for decades, said Nick Hall, a design technology consultant (and one of the people behind Foursquare Door) who IBTimes contacted to help explain how do a barrel roll works.

Web browsers couldn't handle much animation back then so that was done with Flash, Nick said. What's so cool about the barrel roll trick is that they're using new HTML5 and CSS3 technologies that are open standards, rather than the proprietary and closed-off Flash, which until very recently was the only way to do this kind of stuff on the Web.

Google is known for its fantastical nature. And, though the company is made up of serious intellectuals, they do exhibit childlike abandon from time to time.

That is what makes Google so successful.

This kind of whimsy is baked right into the search giant's company culture, writes Mashable's Chris Taylor. Easter eggs are buried all over. April Fools tricks happen year-round. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin built a company that likes to let its hair down every single day, and it's what helped them get where they are now.

After seeing every screen roll for the past two days, now we might hear the Do a Barrel Roll song every time a phone rings.

Thanks, Google. You just brought back the 90s.