Billboards

Posted byRandall 347 Comments on 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.

347 replies on “Billboards”

  3. “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.

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  4. 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.

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  6. 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.

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  7. 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.

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  12. 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….

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  17. @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?

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  18. 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.

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  20. I love XKCD and I’m glad to see this worked!

    Also, requiring math as spam protection: perfect fit 🙂

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  21. 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/
    ————-

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  22. 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.

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  23. 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.

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  24. 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 🙂

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  25. 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.

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  33. 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.

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  35. 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 😀

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  36. Jersey – #1
    China – #1
    Jesus – #2
    Jeeves – #2

    Not bad… a year later.

    THE ALGORITHM LIKES YOUR SISTER.

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  37. I wonder how much money Ask.com spent on this whole campaign, and how much of that ended up being advertising for xkcd alone, without Ask.com getting anything out of it because of the Google bombing. Even with Google’s constant changes and updates to their own search algorithms, something they have stated reduces the effectiveness of link bombs, xkcd still hits the top or close to it for every combination of those phrases I tried, quotes or not.

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  39. I’m thinking we’re winning the Google battle, because when I saw the print at the bottom of the xkcd page, I decided to Google it and I came across some miscellaneous sites and this page. I didn’t come across anything from Ask.com. Are they not acknowledging their failure?

    xkcd, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Algorithm

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  41. Actually, ask.com should be paying you for this. I first noticed this on xkcd – googled it and yay – ask.com viral marketing.

    Also isn’t it time we Rickrolled a whole viral campaign?

    THE ALGORITHM CONSTANTLY FINDS NEO
    THE ALGORITHM KILLED SMITH
    THE ALGORITHM IS BANNED IN ZION
    THE ALGORITHM IS FROM

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  43. Michelle (October 31, 2007 at 2:27 am)
    I just experienced the same “full circle” event. I noticed the small print on the xkcd page, copied it and pasted into Google search so that I could read it and see if there was reference to it in the same motion.
    Here I am.
    Duckloop’d.

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  44. Duckloop’d, indeed. Do you suppose the mother duck could be taken to be Ask, and the folks here at XKCD are simply removing “her” from the campaign just to see what the various blogs will do without it/her?

    Also, anyone who suffers from the Duckloop’d syndrome is a perfect example of #530. What better place to find the meaning of a phrase posted on XKCD’s front page than on the forum?

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  45. And what better place to find something in the forum than via google search

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  47. I use google over ask because it has a no nonsense approach to its page design, rather than because its searching algorithm is better.

    Also I fell victim to copy/pasting this from xkcd.com, pasting it into Google then ending up here. Oh dear.

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  50. Oddly enough, I googled this phrase because I found it at the bottom of XKCD. I’m doing it wrong 😦

    Looks like I’m not the only one though.

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