Bletchley Park: Google easter egg wraps Enigma site’s search results up in code

Google has had a long fondness for the site, providing cash to provide important papers

Keira Knightley, Matthew Beard, Matthew Goode, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Allen Leech in Imitation Game (Snap Stills/REX) (Snap Stills/REX)

Searching Google for Bletchley Park, the site of the breaking of the Enigma code, turns up its own puzzle — which Google then neatly resolves, commemorating the site’s history.

A simple Google of Bletchley Park generates a bunch of code — different every time — which then resolves itself into the normal Google result for the site, written in a typeface reminiscent of early computers.

The Easter egg is a reminder of Bletchley Park’s central role in cracking the Enigma code, a history remembered in the recent film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing.

Google has a fondness for Bletchley Park. It has provided funding for the purchase of key historical papers and helped preserve important parts of the site’s history.

The house was opened in 1938 as a code-breaking centre, where some of the brightest people in Britain were moved and broke the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers.

The work done there in codebreaking is thought to have been central to shortening the war, and perhaps giving the Allies their victory.

Bletchley Park is now a museum, opened in 1993, where it hosts the National Museum of Computing and a number of other exhibits including the house itself and wartime cars. The computing museum hosts some of the first computers built by Turing as part of the codebreaking attempts.