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.
It just occured to me that “the algorithm” must be google’s indexing algorithm.
If it’s indeed from ask.com the “We did not invent the algorithm” is quite clear.
“The algorithm killed Jeeves” is also clear if you consider that once upon a time ask.com was known as “ask jeeves”.
Google was indeed banned in china back then (now they offer a censored version).
The references to “finding jesus” could be ironic, since most people consider google the best search engine.
Where I am really stumped is the “The algorithm is from Jersey”. I can’t find any connection between google and new jersey. If the mean the little island, property of the english crown (thanks wikipedia) there is a google jersey (google.je) but I don’t think this is what the ad means. Maybe the guys in google wear jerseys….
[...] Hä? Die Geschichte ist simpel und xkcd definitiv einen Blick wert. Die Strips sind einfach herrlich, natürlich kann [...]
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.”
“Jersey” might not be a reference to the city. A person’s name, say. You-know-what has a few curious entries.
You’re a marketing genius :)
“Jersey” might have something to do with this. A type of computer project, if Strat’s google connection is correct, it could work.
“Jersey, a reference implementation of JAX-RS (JSR 311), intended for building RESTful Web services”
Somehow I only just noticed this.
The relation to Google does make sense, but perhaps it means Yahoo! as I hear MSN is partnering with them, using their search algorithm to power Bing. Though Microsoft’s marketing tends to be a bit more upfront and in-your-face.
Since I haven’t seem any more on this, I’m wondering if everyone lost interest. If not, and if you haven’t seen this, there’s an article about the campaign at http://blog.ask.com/2007/05/the_algorithm_i.html. It is indeed from ask.com. Maybe it’s working.
PS I Love xkcd.
[...] happen when you take all humans out of the loop and put all faith in the smartness of an infallible Algorithm, you throw your fair share of babies out with the bathwater, and today, one of those babies is me. [...]
has anyone considered possibly translating this into whatever computer language the ask.com algorithm is written in?? or just translating it into python, perl, and the other computer languages?? can you even do that?? idk what i’m talking about, i don’t know any computer languages, i’m proud that i know what an ethernet cable is and how to distinguish it from a usb port and that you do not try to shove the ethernet into the usb. it seems logical to me though that if you translate the phrase into the computer language that wrote the ask.com algorithm and translate it to a language you understand and then translate it to english, you can understand it?? i have absolutely no idea what it is i’m saying. i dont mean to offend people who have a clue what any of this is about. i really dont. it sounded good and made sense in my head i swear it did…. does anyone understand??
I’m not sure if translating normal english into a computer language is possible O.o (But, of course, there’re a dozen ways to do that in Python. Just-type-it-in-and-it-laughs-while-pretending-not-to-understand… that’s my favourite variety, just means that Python’s gathering data about us measly humans before it takes over)