Nice early April 1st gag. The big giveaway is him posting the "off-the-record" comment at the end. No matter how deep into AOL he gets, he'd never give up an off-the-record comment.
This is a pretty rough gag though, if not a little mean:
"That has angered Google revenue chief Nikesh Arora, who has reportedly lashed out at the webspam team privately at various sales events for targeting some of Google’s most valuable partners. Tellingly, Arora recently returned back from a two week jaunt in the Caribbean with Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt, reported TMZ, where the two spent time on Rosenblatt’s new $40 million megayacht pictured left and called (I’m not kidding), The Adsense. Demand Media, worth around $2 billion, generates approximately 100% of its revenues from low quality content wrapped in Google Adsense ads"
Maybe its because I was skimming, maybe its because department versus department battles in a large company feel all too natural, but I have to admit that this had me all the way until:
"It's not like people are going to start using Bing."
I am not keen on these April 1st jokes being posted on HN and it's going to get annoying with all these "true or not true" stories (especially when some truth is added to false articles). I can understand such articles making it to the frontpage of Reddit or Digg and even on Twitter but please discourage this activity from HN.
In fact HN, should do an April Fools celebration of allowing everyone to down-vote every article that is an April Fools joke.
I've always wanted to pull the following April fools prank - get into the office super early and leave some controversial whiteboard sketch in several of the conference rooms (ie major reorg, acquisition, company move , etc) and just see what happens throughout the day.
Definitely april fools. The templating logic for the results page layout would obviously not be affected by the pagerank algorithm. Pagerank could not even be applied to pages which are generated using pagerank, this would entail a feedback loop.
Good for anti-competitive claims MS makes. Google claims each department tries to independently make the best product available and no favors are given to google products. This is a perfect example that google's content spam does not care if the spam comes from within google.
Also gives me lots of confidence in their webspam team.
This is a pretty rough gag though, if not a little mean:
"That has angered Google revenue chief Nikesh Arora, who has reportedly lashed out at the webspam team privately at various sales events for targeting some of Google’s most valuable partners. Tellingly, Arora recently returned back from a two week jaunt in the Caribbean with Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt, reported TMZ, where the two spent time on Rosenblatt’s new $40 million megayacht pictured left and called (I’m not kidding), The Adsense. Demand Media, worth around $2 billion, generates approximately 100% of its revenues from low quality content wrapped in Google Adsense ads"