A friend just sent me this. Can you explain how the heck something like this could happen to a serious site? Are they trying to be funny? Go to Google Maps and do the following:
Probably just some Google employees having fun. I love web Easter Eggs like this.
Those directions suck. You’d be much better off swimming to Southampton and taking the M3 to London.
Brought to you by the same people responsible for writing the code for “French Military Victories.”
It works for Boston-Paris too. And Los Angeles-Copenhagen, but not Los Angeles-Sydney. Maybe it works for all trans-Atlantic trips?
New York to Dublin too.
New York to Paris does the same as we were discussing a couple days ago in MPSIMS.
It’s not that Google isn’t “serious”, they’re just not as stoic as most other big corporations. They do lots of little “just for fun” things like April Fool’s jokes, logo variations for various holidays and important dates, providing the home page in Klingon, etc. California casual, maybe?
Wikipedia, of course, has more about Google’s easter eggs and hoaxes.
Google’s never been a ‘serious’ site. They’ve have an “I’m feeling lucky” button since day one.
If that bothers you, for Og sake, don’t zoom in on The Moon! :eek:
They are serious,
They’re just anticipating the age of ubiquitous amphibious vehicles. Always ahead of the curve, those folks over at Google…
Of course, I think I’d rather drive up through Alaska and swim across the Bering Strait.
Google had no intervention on that one. That was done by a site called Albino Black Sheep, who created a joke page in the style of Google’s “no results found” page. Then they got a lot of other folks on the Web to link to that joke page using the words “French Military Victories”, and Google’s automated page ranking system took notice. Likewise for other “googlebombs”, such as the one for “Weapons of Mass Destruction” (a similar joke page, saying “The weapons of mass destruction you are looking for cannot be found”, etc.), or the one linking “Miserable Failure” to George W. Bush’s official biography.
Ugh, Someone beat me to it.
I live in Washington, Tyne & Wear, UK and wanted directions to Bedford, UK.
Plugged in “Washington” and “Bedford” and got similar results but with the addition of a detailed route across the US as far as NY.
This was about a week ago, so not April 1st but soon after.