I had lunch at Google’s London office today. They’re fed well, these Googlies. And their guests…
On the way out I noticed that, next to the reception desk, there was a scrolling display of search terms that people are currently using.
This is standard now in many of the Google offices, I believe. Here, it was rather nattily projected onto frosted glass.
On the way home, I was wondering how they… ahem… sanitise it. Obviously, there are some search terms that could simply be excised using a checklist. Others could be filtered out based on the content that was actually returned as a result of the search.
But I wonder how many embarrassing phrases, politically-controversial assertions, etc, slip through… Can they filter it algorithmically? Or is there somebody hidden away on some Google campus whose job it is to weed out the unpresentable?
April 28th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
If you ask me, I’d tell you it’s faked.
I spent half an hour in the Google reception a few years ago (before they’d moved to Victoria) and I saw suspiciously repeating searches appearing. I think it’s a little computer program, which looks like this:
load array sanitised_searches();
while we_still_earn_bucketloads_of_profit {
echo sanitised_searches( rand(0,sizeof(sanitised_searches));
wait (a random number of seconds between 0.1 and 2);
}
April 28th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
James,
Yes, I couldn’t help wondering if it was something like that. I think somebody once told me, though, that they had seen searches for recent news stories appearing on the screen; that may have been just after an update, though, I guess!
Quentin