Has anybody found the solution to the internet treasure hunt riddle?
Over the weekend we watched the spreading ripple of the “google atom bomb” idea we published Friday, across the internet. And it’s interesting how it has been interpreted and discussed in different places.
It has also been clear that only a few people, mostly our readers of course :-), were able to extrapolate all the implications of the treasure hunt scenario:
"A billionaire has arranged to give $100m to the first person that clicks on a special link that looks like a Google text ad."
There are some interesting aspects and variations on the idea that become readily apparent.
For example, announcing an internet treasure hunt doesn’t mean an actual one has to be created. Or, that there is any intention of paying out $100m if indeed there was a hidden treasure-link.
Google and the other ad networks cannot police hundreds of thousands of advertisers. It’s all automated anyway, the bidding for keywords, etc. If you have to add more humans to deal with the problem then the business model is slower to scale and profit margins for the ad networks shrink.
But, I think there might be a solution to part of this puzzle, it just came to me. Let me think about it some more.
In the meantime, watching the “google atom bomb” entry spreading by using Yahoo and Google search at different times throughout the weekend has been interesting and at times, bewildering: the number of entries found would zoom around, going up and down by tens of thousands of search links over the space of an hour or two. Was there an algorithm of a second kind at work? Maybe the second algorithm was processing earlier results to provide an improved search experience but with smaller numbers of links?
Maybe some of you search experts out there can tell me more.
dk1257
