We’ll bite, but not too hard. Not hard enough to actually call Google. Not hard enough to insult an “expert†for an opinion about what might be going on.
But, for the record, we will note, along with a big chunk of the mainstream press and some folks in the Twitterverse (where is it not even a trending topic), that Google has put up another inscrutable logo on its landing page. It’s got an alien theme, just like the one 10 days ago that also hasn’t been explained yet. This one is of crop circles, endlessly fascinating for some as evidence of UFO visitations, though most are quickly exposed as terrestrial pranks.
Not that there aren’t plenty of theories for what is going on at Google, which is as impenetrable as Willie Wonka’s factory. It’s just that they are all bad.
And because the logo is associated with map coordinates in England — 1-7 Woodham Rd, Woking, Surrey GU21 4, per Google Maps, to be precise — and because the logo links to the search “crop circles,†and because the U.K. has been something of a center of crop circle phenomena, the Brits are all over it.
The UK Guardian thinks it nailed the solution, and kissed off the story with a (nevertheless hedged) four-graph pish-tosh (â€It’s almost certainly a viral marketing campaign teasing people ahead of some launch in a week or twoâ€) demonstrating galactic unfamiliarity with Google.
The Telegraph, in a blog post (this story not being ready for prime time on their pages, apparently) confidently comforts the reader with a headline that has quotes around the wrong word: “Google UFO logo ‘mystery’ solved.†You see, tacked on to the end is an update with pretty much takes everything back. Please visit that site for the tortured analysis of clues, which begins with number/letter swap code-breaking and ends (though not soon enough) with “a poorly-translated line from a Japanese video game.â€
Our favorite theory is, of course, that the Googleplex has been taken over by aliens — I mean real ones, from outer space, not the frighteningly brilliant mutants that Google gets by clearing out the halls of Stanford.
Which is why calling over there would be pointless, you see. Even though others have been lulled into a sense of false security.
So, let’s recap: Here is mystery Google logo number one, which appeared on Sept. 5:
This one has an “o†being abducted for the anal probes that we all know aliens perform on humans.
Today’s entry sports an astonishingly similar flying saucer, but seems to have the “l†missing:
So, what can we conclude? Well, it is elementary, my dear Watson: In 10 days Google will display another mystery logo, and I am boldly predicting that the “l†will be victimized again. Ten days after that, they will replace the standard logo with the missing letters:
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