Sven Slootweg's Blog

Part 2: http://sven-slootweg.nl/blog/2009/09/06/the-google-unexplained-phenomenon-part-2-the-story-goes-on/

I’ve been digging around the internet a little more on the Google Unexplained Phenomenon. I actually found Andrew Healey’s take on the things at http://halfloaded.com/blog/unexplained-phenomenom-googles-doodle-gogle/. He specifically names the site http://www.unexplainedphenomenon.org/ that I expected to be a scam site (he even states it as a fact), while http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/06/is-this-the-real-answer-to-googles-unexplained-phenomenon-puzzle/ tells us about Joseph James Chung, and about this mystery possibly being a stunt for the O Campaign Foundation.

I tried to sign up to the unexplainedphenomenon.org site with fake details (you can always try, right?) to see what happens. It presented me with an error page.

Now, after looking up this e-mail, guess whose profile page we find? Take a look at http://www.thalas.com/people_joseph_james_chung.html. I’ll quote two very important parts:

Joseph has worked with Google, [...]

He is the co-director of The O Campaign Foundation, a 4,600,000+ member campaign for cancer research and prevention.

Might the answer of TechCrunch, it being a promotional stunt for the O Campaign Foundation, actually be true? It sure looks like it, and I honestly don’t think that unexplainedphenomenon.org is an ordinary scam site.  ”Unexplained phenomenon” could easily refer to cancer. Which makes the picture complete.

Joseph James Chung set up unexplainedphenomenon.org, and cooperated with Google to get publicity for The O Campaign Foundation. Looks correct to me, especially since Google is usually very charitable.

Part 1 of this post can be found here: http://sven-slootweg.nl/blog/2009/09/05/the-google-unexplained-phenomenon/

I’ve been digging through the web a bit, and I found an article on Telegraph.co.uk stating the Google doodle mystery has been solved. It basically tells us that Google has decided to celebrate the anniversary of the “All your base are belong to us” meme from the Japanese game Zero Wing.

The article, however, doesn’t tell us who published this news. Is it really a Google employee that released this information? Or is it just made up by some guy browsing the web, and having the genius idea to “solve” the doodle? You’d think a rather big site like Telegraph.co.uk would provide some source of their information, but strangely they don’t.

Google did nothing to end the speculation with a statement saying: “We consider the second ‘o’ critical to user recognition of our brand and pronunciation of our name. We are actively looking into the mysterious tweet that has appeared on the Google twitter stream and the disappearance of the ‘o’ on the Google home page. We hope to have an update in the coming weeks.”

Doesn’t that sound like Google didn’t actually tell anyone the solution?

The truth, however, was that it was marking the 20th anniversary of Japanese video game Zero Wing.

No source is named anywhere in that piece of text. After this bit of information, the article continues, telling us about the origin of the phrase, and how it became popular. But still no mention of a source anywhere.

In the meantime, some sites take handy advantage of this event. For example, http://www.unexplainedphenomenon.org/ seems to promise more info about this “Unexplained Phenomenom”, but looks very suspicious. Personally I doubt it’s a real site, and I actually suspect it of being an outright scam. At the same time, http://www.googleunexplainedphenomenon.com/ is a site completely dedicated to finding the solution of this mystery. They give us some new info, including a machine translation of a Korean Google blog post.

Apparently this is the first hint in the form of a doodle, in a series of hints that will eventually lead us to the solution of the mystery. GoogleUnexplainedPhenomenom.com also lists a few possible answers to this mystery, that can be thought of with the current amount of information and hints. I guess we will have to wait until September 15 to get the next clue, and see what this is all about.

Still, what is the goal Google is trying to achieve? Are they purely trying to get attention and do some pre-marketing for a new product? Are they trying to entertain their users? Are they, maybe, even doing this just for fun, because they are bored with the usual work? We’ll just have to see. If I pick up any information, I will post it right here on my blog.

Today a very remarkable image appeared on certain versions of Google (so far, the Dutch, Australian, Italian, Portuguese, German, Russian, Argentinian, Japanese, and Chinese version) showing the Google logo, missing an ‘o’, replaced by a UFO. Clicking on it leads to a search page for “Unexplained Phenomenon”, translated into that particular language.

Now, what would this mean? Let’s take a look at the logo first. The filename is “go_gle.gif”. Instead of the usual filename telling us what the doodle is made for, this only adds to the mysteriousness, and again points out the missing ‘o’. Clicking on it brings us to a search results page, that doesn’t show any significant date-related results. However, what it does show is a list of news articles about this specific doodle (at least on the Dutch version it does that).

Now what is the meaning of this? Is there some unknown holiday today? Was it a joke of a Google designer/programmer? Is it a preview of an upcoming name change? Does it forebode a humorous advertising campaign coming up? Maybe, just maybe, it was all an experiment to see what would happen if they put up something “unexplained” (after all that’s what it is), and wanted to see how many pages would be dedicated to this “phenomenon”? My guess is the last one. Either that, or a joke. The rest just seems too unrealistic, and no other information can be found.

So let’s see if Wolfram Alpha can find us something. Searching for “holidays 2009″ gives us a list of internationally known holidays (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=holidays+2009). It doesn’t list anything remarkable for September 5. Let’s check Wikipedia. At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_5, we can see that nothing remarkable should be happening today. Now the big question is: what does the Google Doodle mean?

A few hours ago, Google released a clue through Twitter. Their message at http://twitter.com/google/status/3772868874 translates to “All your O are belong to us”, a wordplay on the traditional “All your base are belong to us”, a mistranslation from the Japanese game Zero Wing. This doesn’t give us an awful lot of extra information, however it does show that Google picked up the crowd of people that has been searching for clues on this Doodle. The rest of the Google account on Twitter does not release any clues.

I could only find one other source telling us anything about Unexplained Phenomenons on September 5. It’s a UFO sighting in Canada: http://www.ufoinfo.com/sightings/canada/040905.shtml. The Guardian, a British newspaper, however, makes a reference to Google in an article about UFOs that was posted today at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/05/unexplained-phenomenon-ufo-google. No further clues are released there though.

I think there is only one thing left to do: wait. Maybe, tomorrow, the second ‘o’ will be gone as well. Who knows.

Sources used: Google, Jeroen.com, Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha