8MLDQ6 T UI – What I learned

Brian Stuckey — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:00:32 +0000

Google ran another one of their semi-famous recruiting campaigns targeting the MIT student body. Apparently it contained an obscured / encrypted code, presumably with instructions on what to do to apply. I found the story and image via TechCrunch and do I did what everyone does:

I Googled it

And I found something much more interesting than zero results. So, I wanted to perform an experiment. I took the code and pasted it on one of my sister sites, TubeClockDB.com and used Ping-O-Matic to notify blogs of the update. WITHIN 10 MINUTES of the ping, I started getting hundreds of hits per hour searching for “8MLDQ6″ This was interesting. Google had crawled my site and started sending search results within just a few minutes.

Astounding Finding #1

They crawled my site, updated their indexes, distributed their updates to all of their machines and started returning my site as a result within 10 minutes.

That is amazing. Simply the quantity of work involved with something like an update is impressive. To do that in a few minutes is astounding. Of course, Ping-O-Matic played a big role in that so hats off to them too.

Astounding Finding #2

Ping-O-Matic does a great job notifying Google and other blog services. If you’re not using them, you’re missing out.

Astounding Finding #3

Almost all of the search results were coming from corporate networks. Huh. Adobe*, I’m looking at you. You take the dubious honor of having the most employees searching for a job at Google from your network. The US Military had the number two position.

*this could change. It was the number one position when I was looking earlier.

Astounding Finding #4

People are lazy. They want to find the answer on Google and give it back to them. I have a feeling that Google is looking for a different kind of person, but I could be wrong. (I’m not, however.)