Sexy Butt

Looking at the video of the scrolling queries screen, shown here in its original Googleplex lobby incarnation, brings to mind a story I heard about events that transpired prior to my joining Google in late 1999.

The idea of displaying the stream of user search queries for marketing purposes was an obvious one, but Larry wouldn't let us do it except at the Googleplex itself. There were privacy issues, but he was also worried that people might try to spam a live public display with multiple submissions of the same search. Highly unlikely by the time Google was processing billions of queries a day, but it did happen once.

When the company was still located in a small second-story office in Palo Alto, Sergey had ops guy Jim Reese set up a projector to send a continuous stream of live queries splashing onto the sidewalk below. At night, pedestrians would stop and stare at the ground for minutes at a time, trying to understand what connected the random terms appearing at their feet.

Engineer Ed Karrels, who was working for SGI at the time, was invited by Google engineer Georges Harik to stop by the search engine for an after-hours party. Before leaving his office, Ed wrote a script that sent the same query to Google ten thousand times. As the party kicked off upstairs, Ed’s query began showing up in glowing letters on the sidewalk below for all of Palo Alto to see, repeating over and over again: “Georges Harik has a sexy butt.”

Ed thinks the prank was one of the reasons Google offered him a job, which he accepted a short time later.