Nice early April 1st gag. The big giveaway is him posting the "off-the-record" comment at the end. No matter how deep into AOL he gets, he'd never give up an off-the-record comment.<p>This is a pretty rough gag though, if not a little mean:<p>"That has angered Google revenue chief Nikesh Arora, who has reportedly lashed out at the webspam team privately at various sales events for targeting some of Google’s most valuable partners. Tellingly, Arora recently returned back from a two week jaunt in the Caribbean with Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt, reported TMZ, where the two spent time on Rosenblatt’s new $40 million megayacht pictured left and called (I’m not kidding), The Adsense. Demand Media, worth around $2 billion, generates approximately 100% of its revenues from low quality content wrapped in Google Adsense ads"
This joke is a little too believable considering that Google has banned itself multiple time before. Danny Sullivan tweeted on this:<p>"google bans itself. april fools! wait, was real <a href="http://selnd.com/hVXAkZ" rel="nofollow">http://selnd.com/hVXAkZ</a> & real <a href="http://selnd.com/cM5LBq" rel="nofollow">http://selnd.com/cM5LBq</a> & real <a href="http://selnd.com/ebJiNB" rel="nofollow">http://selnd.com/ebJiNB</a> :)"
Definitely april fools. The templating logic for the results page layout would obviously not be affected by the pagerank algorithm. Pagerank could not even be applied to pages which are generated using pagerank, this would entail a feedback loop.<p>Pleasingly deadpan prank though.
I've always wanted to pull the following April fools prank - get into the office super early and leave some controversial whiteboard sketch in several of the conference rooms (ie major reorg, acquisition, company move , etc) and just see what happens throughout the day.
It's a clever gag, but titles like this will unfortunately show up in future HN searches.<p>Would it be appropriate to adopt an April 1st etiquette of some sort? Say, an [April Fools] tag in the title?
Good for anti-competitive claims MS makes. Google claims each department tries to independently make the best product available and no favors are given to google products. This is a perfect example that google's content spam does not care if the spam comes from within google.<p>Also gives me lots of confidence in their webspam team.