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Comment by ronnoch | Hacker News Reader

Humorous, sure, but I wonder what percentage of Google Books users will get the reference. If I didn't know about Twitter's fail whale, "Whale Fail" might seem totally random.

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The rest will simply laugh at the Herman Melville reference.

Fail Whale fail, "Whale Fail" fail.

No, it doesn’t make sense, even if you are familiar with Moby Dick. How is the whale failing? How is there any “fail” associated with the whale? The wording only makes sense if you are already familiar with the Fail Whale meme.

Edit: Thanks for pointing out the color of the whale. That does make more sense. But still, I object to the unprofessional and derivative wording. Having any sort of whale on an error page is homage enough, without beating anyone over the head with it or confusing people. “We’re having trouble locating that <del>whale</del> <ins>book</ins>” would make more sense, IMO.

Note the colour of the whale and the dejected expression on Ahab's shoulders.

"Not another fricking black whale", he's saying. "Whale fail!"

fwiw, even the term "fail" alone is still pretty subcultural. i don't entirely agree with alanh, but they are definitely right that many of those who understand the reference are letting their understanding blind them.

this type of blindness is rabidly (albeit understandably) common among technology companies in general. given that that Google reaches all types of users and an error page is meant to inform, i'm not sure the reference is worth the risk.

that all said, i personally find the reference obvious, thus boring. but that's just my opinion. :)

Sure, but it's not necessary to fully understand the page in order to get the message. An error occurred. Why is there a whale involved? Who cares?

The only people I can imagine who might get confused are people who encounter this while trying to read Moby Dick.

i never suggested the reference was detrimental to the page, but it is a risk. proven even just by the fact that it's debatable. it is an error page; the person likely got here because they are confused in the first place. this is especially notable given the huge spectrum of Google's audience.

i don't feel strongly either way on the execution. however, i do feel strongly that it would be negligent for the deciding party to not at least recognize that it is a risk.

Just curious, what age groups to do associate with? Being 20, so around teens and what not 'fail' is said an obnoxious amount. I don't think it's as subcultural as you think. (Some of these people ask how to use Twitter...)

Yes, it's an error page, and it says it is "having trouble finding the page". I don't get the confusion that could cause.

If an obvious reference is boring, why did you complain about the use of fail which is subcultural as you put it?

i'm 22. it's not a generation gap and i'm aware of the virality of "fail" in general. i never suggested in what capacity it existed, just that i would consider it subcultural. even if you assume the extremity that everyone under 22 has heard "fail" to some extent- i'm quite sure they are not Google's primary audience for this product.

i do realize this is not an acute analogy, but allow me to close with a sobering reminder of the truth. google asks: "what is a browser?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ

The whale isn't failing, Ahab is failing at whaling.

All this failing and whaling has got me wailing.

Just to confirm with empirical evidence, I didn't know about the "fail whale" meme until after seeing this, but I still thought Google's page was humorous and made sense.

The worst case scenario is that it makes no less sense than the original Twitter fail whale.

That was a completely out-of-context picture which made no sense, but nobody complained about it. Likewise, anyone confronted with a google books fail whale (which, incidentally, should happen a lot less often than the twitter fail whale, because google's infrastructure doesn't suck) without the preceding context of the twitter fail whale will understand what the page means just as much as they'd understand "404 not found".

Though to such people it's just a nice little piece of art.

No harm done.

I strongly agree with this comment. Sure, all us nerds know the Fail Whale. And Twitter is sort-of mainstream, but has nowhere near the adoption of Facebook — and those mainstream users, even when seeing the fail whale, may not know it goes by that name.

Now while I enjoy the artwork here, and it’s clever, this error page strikes me as

1. Overly nerd-centric / in-joke (Edit: I am referring to the Twitter reference, not the use of the word “fail” here)

2. Unprofessional (the word “fail” used as a noun)

3. Derivative.

1. This use of fail is becoming a fairly standard colloquialism. I don't think it's too hard for the average person to conclude Moby Dick from context, since they've probably heard someone under the age of 25 use fail in a similar manner.

2. Google is renowned and even loved for their "unprofessional" home page logos. This is no different, and there's nothing wrong with a bit of whimsy.

3. As is all art.

Regarding item #2:

The home page doodles are interesting and unconventional, but not unprofessional.

This bastardization of English is not interesting, only unconventional in educated company, and certainly unprofessional.

"All nouns can be verbed, and all verbs can be nouned." (JARGON file).

But seriously, this is how language evolves.

Well it is much nicer than the google default http://www.google.com/blalgalgal

You'd have to have lived under a rock for a few years not to be familiar with the twitter fail whale.

It rhymes.

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