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Comment by bshimmin | Hacker News Reader

I think this is very clever. Assuming this is something to do with recruitment (as the other comments suggest), then of course I find it intensely irritating and it confirms my pre-existing notion that I would never want to work for a company like Google. But, on the other hand, the people who devised this puzzle are clearly people who would be enticed by a puzzle like it, and would therefore think it was a good way to find like-minded people - and they are probably correct in that assumption.

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No puzzle here. You can only log in if Google has flagged your search topics.

On google search, you have the variable window.location.search = "?gfe_rd=cr&ei=XXXGyZiVNHoFcuF8Qe7wYHACw&gws_rd=ssl"

That string is appended to the url of the iframe: src="https://foobar.withgoogle.com/"+window.location.search

I don't see any mechanism that appends it from any search topics when you load https://www.google.com/foobar/

The code snippet will only load the URL with appended values if there are present in the parent URL: e.g. https://www.google.com/foobar/?some_query_string

That's why the link to foobar turns up in people's search results.

Ah! Do you mean the 'chosen ones' will get search results linking to https://www.google.com/foobar/ with a special query string?

Why do you find it intensely irritating? Google's a massive company that employees all sorts of different professions and types of people. This puzzle isn't targeting you, seems successful to me.

Well, that's rather my point - the kind of people who would find it irritating are almost certainly not the kind of people they would be targeting with such a puzzle anyway.

Why do I find it irritating? Because it seems both elitist and adolescent, in a child-like "secret society" sort of way.

I would agree, if this was the only method of getting job offers from Google. But since the "traditional" methods via the Careers page, recruiters, etc, are all still perfectly available, this doesn't bother me at all.

"elitist, adolescent, and "secret society""

That pretty much sums up the people I have met that work in Google engineering. I have only met a few at conferences, but thanks for putting words to the initial feelings I got from them all.

Why is this irritating? Google won't hire you iff you solve the puzzle, this is nothing more than a very popular way for institutions to generate free PR.

It is irritating because the "puzzle" involves having a history of searching for stuff that Google Foobar has tagged as relevant.

If your Google searches are not linked with your Google account or if you search using different search engines, you're out of the game.

I'm using plugins that means I'm not tracked that much. What would I see if I had such a history?

EDIT: Turns out you need a history of googling this stuff. My heavy Python phase in school was timed wrong it seems.

What about people that uses Google Apps accounts? Are they subject to this (corporate)? What about people just use those accounts personally for their own domain? Are they out?

Once again a reminder that Google is, er, a company, whose aim is to, er, make money.

I'm not signed in to Google as a matter of course, and I block their ads, so I provide them very little value. As a result, I won't be able to use "foobar", whatever the hell it is.

Seems fair. Isn't really that irritating, is it? :-)

You're not out of the game. You can apply through all the normal ways - recruiters, ads, networking, etc.

Disclaimer: my opinions are my own and not representing those of my employer or co-workers. I have no direct relationship to this project and haven't looked it up internally.

Has it occurred to any of you that we might do these things for sheer fun, because doing that is not only allowed but celebrated?

The people making the big picture decisions are by far and large not the people who would be enticed by such a puzzle. Hence the dissonance you're observing. (applies to most large companies)

I've done a few exercises in the site. While recruitment seems most likely, I haven't seen anything that explicitly mentions applying to work at Google or anything like that. There are coding challenges and a gamified leveling system based on how many coding challenges you complete within the time limit, but no mention of applications.

I took a look at the site for 5 minutes. If I had the day off, I wouldn't mind spending some time attempting to solve it.

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