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….