You must have already heard yesterday’s biggest tech news by now: Google is now Alphabet, a large umbrella company under which Google itself – well, its internet-related services – will continue to work. But hidden surreptitiously inside CEO Larry Page’s blog post was a subtle shout out to HBO’s satirical show about life in the technology industry, Silicon Valley.
The Easter egg, apparently discovered by one Andy Boyle who tweeted it, is hidden so well that it is no wonder almost no one picked it up what with the big announcement of Alphabet. To access it you need to navigate to the sentence “Alphabet will also include our X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, our drone delivery effort.” Click on the last four words and voila, you are at Hooli.xyz, which is a fake domain for the TV show.
The source code for the Alphabet announcement includes, I think, a joke pointing to the TV show Silicon Valley. What. pic.twitter.com/zPodFRBUsA
— A$AP Andy Boyle (@andymboyle) August 10, 2015
In Silicon Valley, created by Mike Judge of Beavis and Butthead, Office Space, and Idiocracy fame, the tech world is mercilessly lampooned as the fictional corporation of Hooli. The company has been referred to as a fictional Google as it boasts a large campus that is coated in bright colors and workers travel around on bicycles. While the show’s opening scene includes logos from Facebook, Yahoo, Oracle, Twitter and HP, it leaves out both Apple and Google. The scene does include a small logo for YouTube, Google’s (now Alphabet’s) video division, however. Considered a spoof of Google and its growing ambitions, hooli.xyz promises moonshot projects and “radical thinkers who are building not only the future, but the future’s future.”
Google is known for hiding “Easter eggs” in its websites. Try Googling “do a barrel roll” or “zerg rush.” Despite the serious and huge announcement that was Alphabet, Google proves once again that they still have a sense of humor.
The funnier part? Using hidden links is actually against Google’s Terms of Service. Someone’s having the last laugh in Mountain View right now.
http://t.co/C8QzXU9r8N link in Alphabet announcement violates Google’s policy on hidden links http://t.co/4gJ2KOzywV pic.twitter.com/onz37tVcXJ
— Chris Thorman (@christhorman) August 10, 2015
