Google's Bill Board on Highway 101

innovative hunt for talent..

[Chndru]

ZDNet reports a huge bill board on Pacific Coast Highway 101 saying:

{ First 10 digit prime in consecutive digits of e }.com

It translates to [7427466391.com...]

Solving the puzzle on the above website leads to [google.com...]

A nice way to spend a friday afternoon :)

source: [news.zdnet.co.uk...]

[ogletree]

Good find. That is funny. I bet there are some confused drivers. They should put one of those up in Clear Lake Texas near NASA. I know quite a few guys that could do that.

[loanuniverse]

We're tackling a lot of engineering challenges that may not actually be solvable. If they are, they'll change a lot of things. If they're not, well, it will be fun to try anyway. We could use your big, magnificent brain to help us find out....

How about someone with no math skills, but quick enough to find the information and claim to have solved the puzzle in an innovative way?

Hehehe, I specially like the "We could use your big, magnificent brain..." portion.

[rogerd]

Pretty creative. It sort of flies in the face of billboard marketing, which usually mandates extreme simplicity due to the short exposure time and distraction of piloting a vehicle in traffic. Then again, it's more like one of those "buzz" campaigns - few people will attempt to solve it, they'll just get to work and say, "What the heck was that billboard for?" (and someone will tell them).

[paybacksa]

Google just demonstrated how local media can be used to achieve global reach via the Internet spin machine.

Yes, they "bought" local media advertising. Then they violated all the common rules about using it, and the result is a highway billboard that reaches millions of people who never even see it, all over the globe.

Put the bait where the fish are.... and use a long enough line to bring them back to where you are.

[musicales]

Anyone know how to solve the puzzle on the 7427466391.com/ website? What's the answer and why?

[michael heraghty]

It's a series of consecutive sequences of ten digits that add up to the sum of 49. Apparently.

f(6) = 2952605956
f(7) = 0753907774
f(8) = 0777449920
f(9) = 3069697720
f(10) = 1252389784
f(11) = 3163688923

[rogerd]

You are on the money, Paybacksa. Great marketing - get plenty of buzz for under $10K in media expense.

Recently, the restaurant chain Houlihan's ran a series of edgy "nooner" ads promoting their quick lunches. Instead of talking about their food, they used images of sexy twenty-somethings with innuendo-laden captions. The ads were a bit complex for billboards, but the buzz broke into coverage by other local media. I'm sure the chain's marketers were hoping that some conservative group would picket a prominent billboard, but they weren't that lucky.

There's a lesson in this for all of us - creative marketing doesn't have to be expensive. The fact that Google is the advertiser obviously increases the newsworthiness of the story, but it shows that a bit of innovative thinking can trump more massive campaigns.

[Leosghost]

i once had the misfortune to be involved in a bill board campaign in the UK where one of our 12' x 9's of a flying giant carrot ( in horizontal flight position ) caption something like "the worlds fastest carrot"...
found itself next to a 12' x9' of a gorgeous model on all fours facing away from the carrot ...( I forget what the tag line was for the girl it wasn't one of our agency campaigns ) ....
I still run across from time to time ( in the "best media bloopers sort of books" ) a photo that some one took of the 2 panels side by side and somewhat compromising juxtaposition ....

sort of thing makes you pay very close attention to where you buy space ...

google obviously didn't hire any ex colleagues ;)

[digitalv]

Has anyone solved this thing yet? All I've been able to figure out so far is that all of the numbers are sequential numbers inside e that add up to 49, but I don't have a calculator that can show me enough digits.

f(1)= 7182818284
f(2)= 8182845904
f(3)= 8747135266
f(4)= 7427466391
f(5)= __________

e=2.71828182845904523536028747135266249775724709369
e=2.71828182845904523536028747135266249775724709369
e=2.71828182845904523536028747135266249775724709369

Those are the first 3 ... I think I could solve this thing if I could just find the rest of e, can anyone help?

[loanuniverse]

Why don't you just google "e constant"

e=2.7182818284590452353602874713526624977572470936
99959574966967627724076630353547594571382178525166
42742746639193200305992181741359662904357290033429
52605956307381323286279434907632338298807531952510
19011573834187930702154089149934884167509244761460
66808226480016847741185374234544243710753907774499
20695517027618386062613313845830007520449338265602
97606737113200709328709127443747047230696977209310
14169283681902551510865746377211125238978442505695
36967707854499699679468644549059879316368892300987
93127736178215424999229576351482208269895193668033
18252886939849646510582093923982948879332036250944
31173012381970684161403970198376793206832823764648
04295311802328782509819455815301756717361332069811
25099618188159304169035159888851934580727386673858
94228792284998920868058257492796104841984443634632
44968487560233624827041978623209002160990235304369
94184914631409343173814364054625315209618369088870
70167683964243781405927145635490613031072085103837
50510115747704171898610687396965521267154688957035
03540212340784981933432106817012100562788023519303
32247450158539047304199577770935036604169973297250
88687696640355570716226844716256079882651787134195
12466520103059212366771943252786753985589448969709
64097545918569563802363701621120477427228364896134
22516445078182442352948636372

From [linux-egypt.org...]

<edit> Now broken into rows for browser goodness</edit>

[digitalv]

Thanks for the longer version of e. I figured out what the 5th number is and was about to post it but decided against it for the reasons described below. When you figure out the number and log in using it as the password this is what you see:

Congratulations.

Nice work. Well done. Mazel tov. You've made it to Google Labs and we're glad you're here.

One thing we learned while building Google is that it's easier to find what you're looking for if it comes looking for you. What we're looking for are the best engineers in the world. And here you are.

As you can imagine, we get many, many resumes every day, so we developed this little process to increase the signal to noise ratio. We apologize for taking so much of your time just to ask you to consider working with us. We hope you'll feel it was worthwhile when you look at some of the interesting projects we're developing right now. You'll find links to more information about our efforts below, but before you get immersed in machine learning and genetic algorithms, please send your resume to us at ********@google.com.

We're tackling a lot of engineering challenges that may not actually be solvable. If they are, they'll change a lot of things. If they're not, well, it will be fun to try anyway. We could use your big, magnificent brain to help us find out.

I didn't post the answer or e-mail address in the answer because of the reasons Google put in the above notice, but it will probably hit the web at some point anyway. Google is probably going to end up changing this screen in a few days, I don't know if anyone else has solved this yet and/or posted the results but someone will and Google will be flooded with resumes from people claiming to have figured it out.

At least now those of you who don't want to work for Google and would never have figured this out on your own won't waste their time or yours :) I haven't done this much math by hand since high school, heh.

[Chndru]

>>I haven't done this much math by hand since high school, heh.
digitalv, i was looking out for ya in this thread..

Alas, i guess this puzzle is already a week old. And the link to the message you quoted can be found in the first post.

[loanuniverse]

Chndru does have a point :)

[digitalv]

You know what, I didn't even realize that ... when I hit login I didn't even notice that I was redirected to the same link you posted :P

Since that e-mail address is already public then screw it, the answer is 5966290435

heh

[whoisgregg]

Another bit of fun, if you look at the source code of the page at [7427466391.com...] this little message is at the bottom:

<!-- no help here -->

I'm glad I'm not the only one who leaves little cryptic notes in my html... :)

[Leosghost]

it's amazin what you find in veiw source ...and alt text ..;)

[Chndru]

[google.com...]

[Leosghost]

tha fact that they left their CSS on page and what it's about is interesting .

[edit_g]

tha fact that they left their CSS on page and what it's about is interesting

Nope, its the same on their homepage. High traffic sites (where an extra character makes a big difference over a month) usually have their CSS inline to make the page load quicker.

[Leosghost]

yet again demonstrating that my knowledge of CSS ( as applied to page design ) could be written on the pointy end of a pin ....
Tables and font tags 'n'stuff man me guv :)