Google Data Centre Gets Street View Treatment - And Easter Eggs [VIDEO]

Not content with covering millions of miles of road and even the Great Barrier Reef, Google has now turned its famous Street View cameras on itself, uploading a sneak peak of the inside of its data centres - quite literally where the internet is stored.

Using the conventional Street View controls at maps.google.com, users can not only walk around outside the data centres - such as the one in Lenoir, North Carolina - but even look inside.

After a quick scout around we found a dining area decorated in typical Google style, with table tennis and Nascar memorabilia, along with the vast rooms used to store Google's servers - servers which store your emails, websites, YouTube videos and everything else on the internet (and then a backup of everything, just to be sure).

Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure said in a Google blog post: "Very few people have stepped inside Google's data centers, and for good reason: our first priority is the privacy and security of your data, and we go to great lengths to protect it, keeping our sites under close guard. While we've shared many of ourdesigns and best practices, and we've been publishing our efficiency data since 2008, only a small set of employees have access to the server floor itself.

"Today, for the first time, you can see inside our data centers and pay them a virtualvisit. On Where the Internet lives, our new sitefeaturing beautiful photographs by Connie Zhou, you'll get a never-before-seen look at the technology, the people and the places that keep Google running.

Fourteen years ago, back when Google was a student research project, Larry and Sergey powered their new search engine using a few cheap, off-the-shelf servers stacked in creative ways. We've grown a bit since then, and we hope you enjoy this glimpse at what we've built. In the coming days we'll share a series of posts on theGoogle Green Blog that explore some of the photographs in more detail, so stay tuned for more."

While browsing around, we found some of Google's famous Easter Eggs, such as a huge Android locked away with the servers, a Storm Trooper and mini R2-D2 keeping guard in one room, and even a computer screen displaying a "super secret strategic pue plan".

Take a look at the screenshots below, and head over to the link to see if you can find any more.

We found this Star Wars Storm Trooper and a mini R2-D2 keeping guard in one of the huge server rooms.

Perhaps Google's data centres aren't so secret afterall, with this frankly alarming graph left for all to see and worry about. Yes, we know it's not real, please don't hate.

The sign says 'Fort Gtape' and yes that's a giant Android waving at us, but seemingly locked inside one of the server cages. Maybe it's for the best that he stays there.

This might not even be an Easter Egg, because if any company can provide parking bays for your folding micro scooter, then it would be Google.

Nope. We don't know either, but we hope this isn't an underpaid intern.

And finally, this employee is determined to 'Rick Roll' everyone who uses Street View to wonder around his office, as he's playing Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up on his laptop and desktop.

Have you found any more? Visit the data centre here and let us know in the comments below.