Billboards
There’s some strange text on billboards around New York. I passed these four this weekend:
THE ALGORITHM CONSTANTLY FINDS JESUS
THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES
THE ALGORITHM IS BANNED IN CHINA
THE ALGORITHM IS FROM JERSEY
It’s clearly a viral marketing campaign and seems to be by Ask.com. I like puzzles like this, but at the moment it doesn’t seem to go anywhere — if you Google it, you just get blogs talking about the odd billboards. That’s not really very much fun.
It occurs to me that the sort of people who would be curious enough to go to Google and type them in are probably the sort of people who would like xkcd, so maybe we should create a twist in the puzzle. For those of you who have blogs or other sites, feel free to create links to xkcd.com with those billboard lines as the link text. I put the phrases at the bottom of xkcd.com so it won’t be filtered out as a Googlebomb.
April 19th, 2007 at 3:17 am
Done. Let’s rock this.
April 19th, 2007 at 3:20 am
These are in San Francisco too (of course). It’s a new “Edison” search algorithm. Basically they’re hoping that they can take two companies that they bought and make them work together to produce something useful:
http://mashable.com/2007/04/13/ask-edison-algorithm
April 19th, 2007 at 3:32 am
do you find it at all odd that you saw a viral marketing campaign for ask search, and went to google to find out more?
April 19th, 2007 at 4:25 am
As Braden said: Done. Let’s rock this.
This ought to be interesting.
April 19th, 2007 at 5:35 am
Ask.com have currently got a bunch of adverts around the London Underground train system pointing at the website http://information-revolution.org/ and claiming that “most people have stopped searching for better search”… It seems to me to be a last ditch effort on the part of Ask.com before they go out of business :P
April 19th, 2007 at 6:02 am
I comply.
You’re at #8 so far.
April 19th, 2007 at 7:51 am
THE ALGORITHM CONSTANTLY FINDS VELOCIRAPTORS
THE ALGORITHM IS RED SPIDERS AND RED SPIDERS IS THE ALGORITHM
THE ALGORITHM MAKES ME A SANDWICH
THE ALGORITHM BECAME USELESS FINDING THE RATE OF CHANGE OF LOVE WITH RESPECT TO X
…the algorithm would make a good blog entry, wouldn’t it?
April 19th, 2007 at 8:33 am
I saw those on my drive up to CT this weekend. However, I forgot to google them. I almost always see something I want to google when I drive a long distance, and also almost always forget to actually do it.
I think the driving world may be the only place in my life completely seperated from the internet.
April 19th, 2007 at 8:54 am
You Googled them? Then surely the internet is coming to an end!! You need to visit Ask.com, quick!
Also…
THIS ALGORITHM IS SO GOOD IT DOESN’T NEED VIRAL MARKETING CAMPAIGNS!
The “information revolution” campaign is awful in every way.
April 19th, 2007 at 9:08 am
[...] response to this. THE ALGORITHM CONSTANTLY FINDS JESUSTHE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVESTHE ALGORITHM IS BANNED IN CHINATHE [...]
April 19th, 2007 at 9:16 am
THE ALGORITHM PUTS THE LOTION IN THE BASKET, OR IT GETS THE HOSE AGAIN
April 19th, 2007 at 9:18 am
Happy to comply!
April 19th, 2007 at 9:31 am
Done, and fingers crossed it will work.
Sam
April 19th, 2007 at 9:33 am
[...] (Siehe hier [...]
April 19th, 2007 at 9:45 am
Hijacking a viral marketing campaign.
I find your ideas intriguing, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
April 19th, 2007 at 9:52 am
You haven’t gotten to the top on the first two yet, but the others you’re getting up there.
April 19th, 2007 at 10:09 am
[...] What is the Algorithm? Sorry, I’m a bit of an xkcd junkie. So what comes around there, goes around here. [...]
April 19th, 2007 at 10:43 am
Done!
. . . .and brilliant. :-)
April 19th, 2007 at 10:44 am
As near as I can figure, if you put these phrases into Google, you get a bunch of people talking about the ads–but if you put them into Ask.com, you get references to Jesus, or “banned in China” or whatever the second half of the phrase is. So maybe the point of the ad campaign is to show that Google is subject to manipulation that can prevent you from finding what you want to know about, by deliberately creating confusing phrases that people talk about on blogs. Basically, we’re spamming Google and enhancing Ask’s algorithm just by having this conversation.
If that’s what it is, it’s pretty pointless, because people inputting those phrases right now are probably more interested in the ad campaign than, say, Jesus, and thus even a blog wondering about the ad campaign is, in fact, closer to what the user was looking for than actual information on Jesus.
April 19th, 2007 at 10:48 am
Done!
April 19th, 2007 at 10:53 am
I MUST OBEY
April 19th, 2007 at 11:16 am
One of my friends up in New England is, thanks to the various wireless/cellular devices tucked into his clothing, a walking access point. I didn’t quite appreciate this until he opened my laptop and checked something on Wikipedia while we were going down the highway at 65 MPH.
April 19th, 2007 at 11:46 am
You are #1!!!
http://www.google.com/search?q=THE+ALGORITHM+IS+FROM+JERSEY
#2 with quotes.
April 19th, 2007 at 3:10 pm
a GS for “THE ALGORITHM IS” has XKCD at second-from-bottom.
Damn. Must work harder.
April 19th, 2007 at 3:14 pm
I played with it on Ask.com, and as far as I’m concerned, The Algorithm Can’t Find The Algorithm Can’t Find The Algorithm Can’t Find The Algorithm Can’t Find The Algorithm Can’t Find… ad infinitum.
April 19th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
[...] THE ALGORITHM IS BANNED IN CHINA [...]
April 19th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
Haha, nice! Of course the proper way to hijack a viral marketing scheme would be to not mention the actual source in the comments section. Otherwise the ad is still working as intended, and drawing people to the site.
April 19th, 2007 at 7:16 pm
@Alex: Or is it? Because while yes, we still mention the source, we’re also pretty much shunning it by using Google instead.
April 19th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
[...] xkcd » Blog Archive » Billboards (tags: Advertising XKCD The_Algorithm Ask.com Google Edison) [...]
April 20th, 2007 at 12:05 am
Algorithm Invented the Internet
The algorithm constantly finds Jesus.
(In response to this.)
…
April 20th, 2007 at 1:08 am
Here’s a link to a page about the algorithm. It’s through the Google result page someone above me linked to, where the first result was Yahoo Answers.
http://valleywag.com/tech/mystery-billboards/asks-advertising-campaign-249274.php
It shows pictures of it, and a close-up where it says (C) 2007 Ask
Here’s the Yahoo Answers page too: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070405053533AAl67LZ
April 20th, 2007 at 2:49 am
All around the London and Tower Bridge area of London there is grafitti on corners that says simply “The Alphabet of Brooke Shields”.
Why?
I dont know!
April 20th, 2007 at 5:50 am
Done.
Well done.
April 20th, 2007 at 7:35 am
Done. Ta!
April 20th, 2007 at 9:19 am
Burn the Bilboard Down!
April 20th, 2007 at 10:48 am
[...] THE ALGORITHM CONSTANTLY FINDS JESUS THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES THE ALGORITHM IS BANNED IN CHINA THE ALGORITHM IS FROM JERSEY If you have to ask…. [...]
April 20th, 2007 at 10:50 am
I, too, found it odd that you googled an ask.com add. it’s definitely weird. you should make a comic about it when it’s resolved. :D
April 20th, 2007 at 10:51 am
I find it hard to believe that I could spell add like that. lol.
April 20th, 2007 at 10:52 am
My apologies. Let’s just start over.
I, too, found it odd that you googled an ask.com AD. it’s definitely weird. you should make a comic about it when it’s resolved. :D
April 20th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Ask.com have a lot of ads on trains and stuff claiming some sort of “information revolution” with some sort of apparently grass-roots campaign against one organisation “controlling” our information sources. It’s pretty pathetic.
April 20th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
You’re first with THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES, fifth with CONSTANTLY FINDS JESUS, third with IS FROM JERSEY, and fifth with IS BANNED IN CHINA. All with quotes.
We’ll get there.
April 20th, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Even better: Folks, when you do these searches, CLICK the XKCD link when your resuls aredisplayed. Make sure google knows what to look for!
April 20th, 2007 at 4:46 pm
[...] (wtf?) [...]
April 20th, 2007 at 5:39 pm
Ev!L :D
+1 done!
April 20th, 2007 at 6:11 pm
If anyone had the power to control our information, Google would be that someone. Organization. But seriously, telling yourself that there’s no way that they would keep information from us advances nothing.
Be suspicious of Google, Ask, Hotbot, Lycos, and anyone else that stands between you and information. Act as if they would hide information from you. If you act as if they wouldn’t, you are helpless.
April 20th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Ask.com has stopped giving pointless results with these. Oh, and http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/070417-225318
April 21st, 2007 at 7:48 am
“The Ask.com algorithm’s relevance methodology goes beyond the popularity focus of Google, Yahoo and MSN’s, and is the only one to break the Web down into topic clusters and determine community-based relevance in real time.”
That makes perfect sense…
April 21st, 2007 at 2:30 pm
You’re first with “killed jeeves” and “from Jersey”
You’re 4th with “China”
You’re 6th with “Jesus”
We need to work harder on the last two!
April 21st, 2007 at 3:06 pm
I didn’t know it was a campaign by Ask.com until I searched, of course. :)
April 21st, 2007 at 3:51 pm
The blag compels me, and I obey.
Rock the google. XD
April 21st, 2007 at 8:24 pm
[...] With three tangential connections: THE ALGORITHM IS BANNED IN CHINA. Explanation. [...]
April 21st, 2007 at 11:46 pm
Hey it’s workin’
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=+THE+ALGORITHM+CONSTANTLY+FINDS+JESUS
April 22nd, 2007 at 1:47 am
[...] This is rich; hope you don’t mind Chris! Explanation here. [...]
April 22nd, 2007 at 2:33 am
We seem to be winning… first on each except for “THE ALGORITHM CONSTANTLY FINDS JESUS”, where we’re third. And that’s quotes or no quotes for all four.
April 22nd, 2007 at 11:55 pm
Excellent! Thanks to ask.com for the free publicity!
April 23rd, 2007 at 2:28 pm
Hijacking a viral marketing campaign. Adorable.
April 23rd, 2007 at 5:05 pm
This is really really cool. Sadly, we’ve fallen to 3rd and 4th on some of them.
April 23rd, 2007 at 5:29 pm
[...] points out that there’s some viral marketing bill boards around that don’t have enough of a point. [...]
April 23rd, 2007 at 10:42 pm
Done, I like pranks like these. ‘The algorithm killed Jeeves’ is a link on my main page.
April 23rd, 2007 at 11:54 pm
Saw one on the Major Deegan last week. I’ll pass it again tomorrow morning and update.
April 24th, 2007 at 12:14 am
The muteKi is the algorithm. Without The muteKi, there is no algorithm.
The muteKi is not from Jersey.
I don’t get why anyone would have thought this would be a good ad campaign. Practically nobody is using ask.com to find out information about this.
April 24th, 2007 at 3:56 am
added all four to my lj link list. good luck in your quest!
April 24th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
[...] few days behind, but it’s such a great comic, I’ll do what I can to help. Check out the blag post for the low [...]
April 25th, 2007 at 6:24 am
[...] schon klassisches virales Marketing. Es geht nicht um einen neuen Film oder um ein Buch, sondern um eine Werbekampagne für eine Suchmaschine, die sich als Konkurrenz zu Google positionieren will. Soweit, so [...]
April 25th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
In a way, we’re showing one of the weaknesses of Google, in that it can be subverted like this. Is Ask subject to this kind of joke? Or is it just that no one ever bothered…
Either way, kudos.
April 26th, 2007 at 12:36 am
You got it. Done and done.
April 26th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
Roger that.
April 27th, 2007 at 1:54 am
Personally, I view it as a STRENGTH of Google. You have a group of people who determine that this phrase is more relevant to the phrase than whatever else is ahead of it, and are working to fix that. Just look at the blag entry. We feel that the people who search for this phrase are more likely to be geeks, and interested in this comic. The ‘viral marketing’ scheme is poorly thought out for ask.com, and is better suited for xkcd. As a result, because fewer people feel the need to relate that term to ask.com than they do xkcd.com, xkcd.com is returned first.
It’d be like going around, asking people what “The algorithm constantly find jesus” means, and throwing out the answers of people who don’t know. It’s better than ignoring people who answer in a way you think might be somewhat snarky, because sometimes there’s value in snarky answers.
Also, I like the word snarky.
April 27th, 2007 at 2:18 am
Yeah. Snarky IS a fun word…
April 27th, 2007 at 4:24 am
Indeed. Snarky is an excellent word.
And I suppose I see the point. But what I want to know, I guess, is why the ad campaign was so poorly thought out. You’d think there are people like us working for Ask.com, or they’d have gone under years ago. There had to be people who understood that people aren’t going to put those phrases together and think “search engine”, and that people like us would hijack the idea.
April 27th, 2007 at 10:06 am
In Soviet Russia, YOU find the Algorithm.
April 27th, 2007 at 10:29 pm
xkcd is now the first ghit for “the algorithm is”.
April 27th, 2007 at 10:37 pm
THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES
April 28th, 2007 at 12:34 am
We need reinforcement on the “The algorithm killed Jeeves” front, but otherwise we’re at number 1 it seems.
April 28th, 2007 at 12:25 pm
Constantly finds Jesus (no quotes) comes up as third on Google.
April 29th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
The xkcd blog post is absolutely right. I found the xkcd.com site simply because I got intrigued about the ask.com billboard ads and googled it landing me on this site.
But I still don’t understand the ads. Those ads must cost Ask.com a lot of money. But what do they want the viewers of those ads to do? How does Ask.com expect those ads to make money for them? If they want more viewers to use Ask.com, they should at least put Ask.com on the ads or soemthing.
April 30th, 2007 at 6:03 am
Ask must have hired “The Apprentice” staff to manage their viral division. Their viral marketing is transparently corporate, stupid, and not very viral. I’ve only seen one halfway decent corporate viral campaign and it never gained much traction - http://shaveeverywhere.com/ (Phillips pimping a razor for Christmas that gives guys an extra “optical inch”)
April 30th, 2007 at 11:48 am
Done! Brilliant.
April 30th, 2007 at 6:14 pm
With regard’s to Steve’s comment, I think Cyan’s espionage stuff for Riven back in the late 90s and their ARG for the first (botched) URU launch back in 2003 were pretty cool marketing, but probably not “viral” per se.
But they were certainly more interesting to me (as a person already invested in the product) than an ad saying “Hey! Buy this!” (Or, in Ask.com’s case, “try this!”).
May 1st, 2007 at 2:40 pm
Am I the only one who thinks it’s funny that there’s a billboard suggesting that someone killed a butler?
AN ALGORITHM A DAY KEEPS THE DOCTOR AWAY
May 2nd, 2007 at 2:33 pm
I haven’t seen these biilboards, because I’m not american, but I find this interesting because I read a book some time ago where one main character programmed some kind of super algorithm that could be used to make awesome search engine. After I saw this here that came back to my mind.
May 2nd, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Done @ 7:00AM EST
Your Tied with O’Reilly at Alexa
2:56PM.
May 5th, 2007 at 1:59 am
I saw these ads a few days ago in a BART station. “The algorithm killed Jeeves,” “The unabomber hates the algorithm,” and one other that I don’t recall. At first I planned to Google it, but then I made the Jeeves connection. I associate Jeeves with the original “Jeeves and Wooster” book and PBS series, so it threw me. But as I sat there, waiting for my connection, I made the connection that there was an “Ask Jeeves” search engine, so the point was probably that some other, stronger search algorithm had replaced Ask Jeeves.
I did not know that “Ask.com” even existed. And when I finally thought to prove my hypothesis, I Googled “The Algorithm” and received a lot of links to mathmatical sites. So from my point of view, the ad campaign was a complete and utter failure. Curious as to whether others thought so, I did some more Googling, and got pointed here.
Well met!
May 6th, 2007 at 10:40 am
Incidentally, xkcd is also number one for “THE ALGORITHM CONSTANTLY FINDS JESU”, for all of you Christians out there who are just terrified of going to extra mile. Or letter.
May 6th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
My contribution.
LOVE IS THE ALGORITHM THE ALGORITHM IS DEATH
May 6th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
I posted it on my MySpace and Facebook blogs. Doing my part for the information revolution!
We can hijack that name too.
May 7th, 2007 at 9:43 pm
For THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES, xkcd is the fifth result on ask.com. I just don’t get what they’re trying to do.
May 8th, 2007 at 2:32 am
[...] http://blag.xkcd.com/2007/04/19/billboards/ [...]
May 8th, 2007 at 4:46 am
This is not the algorithm, this is SPAAAAARTA!
…I had to.
May 9th, 2007 at 3:47 am
Remember back a few years, when the geeks tried to stop the internet from being commercialized?
It just occurred to me that this could be the root.
All advertising is based on catch phrases!
The question now is, do we still want to do battle with the corporations?
Much of the recent and foreseeable development is good, in my opinion.
With out the good cause (xkcd), it seems pointless.
Choosing especially loathsome advertising might be fun though…
Any ideas for targets?
Military? Plastics companies? Neo-con web sites? Spectacle TV?
May 9th, 2007 at 5:05 am
THE ALGORITHM IS SPARTICUS
May 9th, 2007 at 8:35 am
No, I’m Spartacus.
May 9th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
The algorithm will always yield 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0.
May 12th, 2007 at 4:17 am
you want a conspiracy? Here’s a conspiracy: My friend Dave runs a small phpBB3 message board with only 23 members and closed registration, but almost once a week, I’m online at the same time as a user called “Google [Bot]” who’s not actually a user and has no profile. Google is following me! It’s a trap!
May 14th, 2007 at 1:28 am
How does one go about finding the frequency of searches?
May 15th, 2007 at 2:13 am
Here’s irony. I googled “THE ALGORITHM” and the digg story was on the front results page. I used ask.com, and there were no hits on their own ad campaign. THE ALGORITHM FAILS AT LIFE.
May 15th, 2007 at 7:43 pm
Heh, it looks like the good folks here at xkcd weren’t the only ones with this idea. The top two hits a few moments ago on google for the phrase:
The algorithm killed Jeeves
are a couple of online marketing consultants. I guess they know what they are doing.
xkcd is 4th at the moment.
But, better yet, the Sponsored link at the very top of the page is bought and paid for by Ask.com
So let me get this straight. First Ask.com develops this poorly conceived viral marketing campaign, and now they are actually paying google to advertise their search engine.
Frankly, I’m not sure how to feel.
I couldn’t resist clicking on their sponsored link though :)
May 16th, 2007 at 12:40 am
The thought occurred, Ask.com is a part of this, (there it is again). So it worked.
It’s here with us; but I don’t like it.
That’s their problem.
James Said:
“How does one go about finding the frequency of searches?”
I just got a free ‘thingy’ called StatCounter. Sitemeter, is good, ‘Tracking’ is another key search word.
mh
May 16th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
Awesomesauce. I am participating in the BloGoogling.
May 16th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
[...] THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES. [...]
May 16th, 2007 at 11:25 pm
BloGoogling
I sending this to Webster! It’s the best word this year… I’D say.
Great looking site newsong.
May 16th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
The Ring scared me, too.
May 17th, 2007 at 2:10 am
“As near as I can figure, if you put these phrases into Google, you get a bunch of people talking about the ads–but if you put them into Ask.com, you get references to Jesus, or “banned in China†or whatever the second half of the phrase is. So maybe the point of the ad campaign is to show that Google is subject to manipulation that can prevent you from finding what you want to know about, by deliberately creating confusing phrases that people talk about on blogs. Basically, we’re spamming Google and enhancing Ask’s algorithm just by having this conversation.”
It’s funny that one person would say that. It inspired me to put the lines into Ask, and all that came up were blogs talking about what it might mean. So if this person was right, Ask didn’t think this one through very well.
Yay for Google.
May 17th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
so, I linked from my site to both this entry and the xkcd site, and the next thing I know, thealgorithmkilledjeeves.com has pinged me. My ‘wtf?’ instinct told me to check out the offending site… and I found that it’s covered in Google ads.
May 18th, 2007 at 12:31 am
[...] doesn’t want to be as cool as the guy behind xkcd? In a recent blog post, he decided Ask.com’s viral marketing campaign could use a twist. To help him in his quest, I [...]
May 18th, 2007 at 2:02 pm
I’m not sure how recent an occurrence it is, but Ask.com has started paying for a Sponsored Link for Ask.com at the top of the Google results page for search strings including “the algorithm is”.
Seems counter-productive.
May 22nd, 2007 at 10:38 am
When a product makes money on advertising, is already huge, and still needs to advertise to get users to see advertising…. the business model is dead.
June 3rd, 2007 at 9:42 pm
yay!
June 13th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
Lets test that theory, handmade jewelry?
July 11th, 2007 at 7:51 am
ALL YOUR ALGORITHM ARE BELONG TO US.
July 12th, 2007 at 4:24 am
[...] For an explanation for this go to THE ALGORITHM KILLED JEEVES, [...]
August 7th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
So…. I think their marketing campaign worked on me…. I went to google and searched for some of the phrases, to see if xkcd came up as the top hit for any of them…. it did, but only for the “constantly find jesus” one. I assume that’s because the other bloggers weren’t smart enough to spell “constantly”
But here’s the thing, I got intrigued, and went to ask.com to read about the “new algorithm” that these billboards are supposed to be advertising, and it intrigued me.
I’ve been idly trying to look up good rogue talent builds for world of warcraft on Google, and I was working through 8 pages of trash before even finding one site that matched my search parameters… so I tried it on Ask, to see if they were any better…. turns out they were…. all 5 of the top 5 matches were exactly what I wanted.
So they had a stupid marketing campaign that doesn’t make sense to anybody, however THIS moron is now going to a different search engine as my first choice….
August 20th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Did anybody try:
thealgorithm.com
???
That’s some interesting info.
August 20th, 2007 at 11:56 pm
Success! God I love you guys.
August 27th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
It’s a bit late in the day but I’ll give it a shot as it sounds so cool!
August 30th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
Happy to comply!
=)
September 3rd, 2007 at 11:20 pm
@Kevin:
Interesting info there, indeed. Maybe I’m missing something, but — what’s the differences, on at least a superficial level, between that at Google PageRank?
September 11th, 2007 at 10:38 am
You know, as someone currently living in China… I must remark that I find it terribly funny that “ask.com” is actually NOT banned in China.
September 25th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Ah, but is it USED in china.
Lack of public usage, seems like a sort of indirect ban to me…
XD
October 5th, 2007 at 11:52 am
I love XKCD and I’m glad to see this worked!
Also, requiring math as spam protection: perfect fit :)
October 23rd, 2007 at 5:22 pm
This is genious. Enter ‘The algorithm is from jersey’ (without the inverted commas) into ask.com’s own search engine. Guess what’s the first result? (apart from a sponsored ad my brain decided to nearly ignore)
————-
xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By …
… invent the algorithm. The algorithm consistently finds Jesus. The algorithm killed Jeeves. The algorithm is banned in China.
xkcd.com/
————-
October 31st, 2007 at 2:27 am
I find this really funny, because I was just looking around XKCD, reading the latest update when I noticed the tiny print on the bottom so I opened the source code to find out what it was. What I saw was, of course,
“We did not invent the algorithm. The algorithm consistently finds Jesus. The algorithm killed Jeeves. The algorithm is banned in China. The algorithm is from Jersey. The algorithm constantly finds Jesus.This is not the algorithm. This is close.”
Then I wondered what the heck that was so I tried looking it up, first on wikipedia, then on google. I found nothing on wiki under either the full first half of the phrase or ‘the algorithm’. I put the whole first half in quotes on google and was directed back to XKCD and a couple of mindless blogs. I clicked on the blogs and saw the idea of the ad campaign and then I entered the phrase without the quotes and was directed to this blog entry.
So, amusingly enough, this has come full circle. I suppose its an amusing waste of 15 minutes.
November 4th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
Michelle. This happened with me EXACTLY now!
I was amused with the “do you find it at all odd that you saw a viral marketing campaign for ask search, and went to google to find out more?” comment. Never thought of using ask.com to find out more.
November 30th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Aw you people seem to have a lot of fun to be revolutionary here. Of course it is a great idea to use the ask.com campaign for xkcd (which i love, of course).
but: did anybody just try ask.com? its great. it mean it, just remember to give it a try the next time something you search can’t be found using google
i mean, okay so the ad campaign did not work how you belive it was intended? so, well i remember back in the old days, when everybody was using … well … some other search engines, google hit like a bomb. it spread very fast between us young people in schools, highschools, universities, at work and so on.
but it did not spread between “normal” people, people that work in supermarkets or at law firms, people that watch all-day tv or think about what shampoo to buy.
it spread between those super-computer-affine geeks, it spread between those young people, the first generation that grew up with the internet. and it spread between those because it actually was so much better than all other systems.
but why did it spread between those people the fastest? because those people where actually the kind of people that often that take a closer look at details.
and that is the target audience that ask.com’s marketing had in mind … you, the clever ones, those that talk about “the algorithm” long enough to actually try ask.com
i really want to know how many people searched for “… algorithm …” in google, found xkcd and then tried out ask.com … so that they’re now enriched by a super great webcomic and a super great search engine :)
December 13th, 2007 at 7:48 pm
I just spent an hour talking with a tech friend of mine trying to figure out whether the “consistently finds Jesus” line was actually a reference to something else or not. It seems awfully familiar for it to be something they just made up. No dice, so far.
(Yes, I do believe I’m one of those minds that gets hit by mack trucks when you hold up intriguing puzzles in my direct line-of-sight.)
Having said that, I’d like to address that last comment made right there. I’m a firm believer in the theory that google’s rise to fame came about because it’s just that much easier to type than any other search engine at the time was. Five characters, and the trickiest part of the word is actually that there’s two “o”s in a row. I actually had a harder time typing “trickiest” just now than I did in typing “google.”
But I also think there’s more to its stay of power than that. Most prominently, (or, perhaps, least prominently) google’s ads are the most unobtrusive ads in any search engine, hands down. Go check out lycos right now, I dare ya. You almost can’t find the text field anymore. Yahoo’s not much better. Ask.com seems to have adopted a more google-like approach, surreptitiously inserting its sponsored links into the “actual” results, and without that oh-so-ostentatious splash page directing you to all sorts of functions that are definitely not a search engine. But it still lacks the elegance of google: just a damn list. Options at the top, browsing links at the bottom. Bam. Done. No frame on the left. No frame at the top. No ad for their downloadable plugin at the bottom. Just the links and their captions.
I think there’s a lot to be said for that, whether or not ask actually has a faster/more comprehensive algorithm. Google’s not shilling their products down my throat, and that makes me more willing to use them by far.
January 12th, 2008 at 10:37 pm
I love XKCD and I’m glad to see this worked
March 11th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Great info, thanx.
March 27th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
[...] What is the Algorithm? Sorry, I’m a bit of an xkcd junkie. So what comes around there, goes around here. « Timezone Begone! Lollypop » [...]
April 16th, 2008 at 3:53 am
The thing is, I do believe the marketing campaign worked for Ask.com since I had never heard of its organisation before xkcd… ^_^
April 27th, 2008 at 2:14 am
I was working through 8 pages of trash before even finding one site that matched my search parameters…
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chamila
Wow, check out this site called http://www.fluc.com. Free SMS and free mobile ads!! Its fantastic
April 28th, 2008 at 2:39 am
I guess they know what they are doing.
chamila
Today social accounting become most significant issue in accouting
http://www.accountingforsocial.blogspot.com/
July 8th, 2008 at 3:04 am
allegra…
allegra pregnancy…
July 23rd, 2008 at 7:03 am
THE ALGORITHM IS HERE
THE ALGORITHM IS NOW
I AM THE ALGORITHM YOU ARE THE ALGORITHM WERE ALL THE ALGORITHM TOGETHER
happy google snagging…. though you really should try this on ask.com instead, just for ironies sake.
August 3rd, 2008 at 2:16 am
THE ALGORITHM CONSISTENTLY FINDS YOUR MOM
August 16th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
Today I realized there were those phrases very little at xkcd homepage. I searched google, of course, and ended here.
Now I added a link to xkcd.com with these phrases. I don’t know if it still worth something.
Anyway, it is very interesting thing :)
And of course thank you for xkcd comic :D