Google Airs Super Bowl Ad 315
theodp writes "CNET's hunch that Google might run a Super Bowl ad entitled 'Parisian Love' proved to be well-founded. The ad just ran (did you know that you can search the Internet using Google?), and Apple certainly doesn't have to worry about losing its claim to having produced the best Super Bowl ad ever. In fact, you might want to check out the spoof 'Parisian Love' apparently inspired — 'Is Tiger Feeling Lucky?' — if you want to see a better pitch for Google."
First Polanski (Score:4, Funny)
Did anybody else find that kinda...creepy? Like some Roman Polanski just met a possibly underage girl* in a chat room and now he's going to stalk her* while fantasizing about moving near her*, gettin married*, and having a kid* all while he dosen't even know French*.
* the "girl", "AA 120" airline, "jobs", "church", "crib", and "translate" searches; respectively.
Re:First Polanski (Score:5, Insightful)
I have been described as seriously cynical and highly lacking empathy. Hell, even my girlfriend calls me souless. But I nearly cried at the end.
Brilliant ad.
Re:First Polanski (Score:5, Insightful)
It's so touching knowing that a soulless, multinational, 100 billion dollar company thinks you should integrate it into every part of your life.
But yeah, I almost cried too. Kinda scary how easy it is to manipulate our emotions for commercial gain.
Re:First Polanski (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:First Polanski (Score:5, Funny)
Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto
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Wow. Sucks to be you.
I'm dead serious.
Re:First Polanski (Score:5, Insightful)
No, actually. Would never have crossed my mind.
I think you just have issues.
I see how you might be confused (Score:5, Insightful)
This being Slashdot, I understand how this might seem confusing to some readers, but that's actually the way some romances happen. A guy meets a girl, likes her, tries to impress her, and amazingly, it works.
Re:I see how you might be confused (Score:5, Funny)
There must be some mathematical equation or perl or ruby script involved somewhere.
Re:I see how you might be confused (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I see how you might be confused (Score:5, Funny)
Be careful. Some of the male readers here might be caught by that.
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begin
while (tits.size < "36c") find tits;
end
FTFY
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Infinite loop detected
Re:Mod parent funny/insightful (Score:5, Funny)
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Perl and Ruby script (Score:4, Funny)
it goes like this:
Guy: "Hi, you're very pretty to me, here are some PERL earings. Will you go out with me?"
Girl: "...."
Guy: "I even got you this RUBY hairpin, will you go out with me now?"
Girl: walks away
Guy: "..."
There's really no need to automate this, seeing as there are no unpredictable branches in the pipeline. You're going to get the same result every time. You might as well write "GOTO 5" and be done with it.
Re:Perl and Ruby script (Score:5, Funny)
Guy: Here's a python.
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This being Slashdot, I understand how this might seem confusing to some readers, but that's actually the way some romances happen. A guy meets a girl, likes her, tries to impress her, and amazingly, it works.
Maybe it's just me but I was also expecting to see searches for "lotion," "skin," and "hoses."
Re:First Polanski (Score:5, Insightful)
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There were technical inaccuracies in the advert.
The cursor moved, which in reality triggers that bullshit, javascript fade thing.
The google SERPs page only looks like that to an adblock user.
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Google has been in business now (if your a 20 something) for over half our lives, and this was a sped up version of what an "average" person may have Googled over their lifetime.
If you're a 20 something, WTF do you think you know about an "average" lifetime?
At best, this was Google shorthand for the plot of some hackneyed romantic movie.
Re:First Polanski (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:First Polanski (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sitting on the couch yesterday, my gf asked when is the Stupid Bowl. So I put in a natural language query (sans quotes of course:)
The first result was "Super Bowl XLIV - New orleans Saints vs. Indianapolis Colts. Sunday, Feb. 7 2010 -6:25 pm ET on CBS" with a link to nfl.com. Each team name was a link to their team website.
I don't think they could have done a better job on the first result than that.
We wandered around the house, got bored, eventually turned on the
Re:First Polanski (Score:5, Funny)
Re:First Polanski (Score:5, Funny)
I really do get a similar result for your 3rd example:
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*Didn't watch the commercial*
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Buy cafes near the louve on ebay
Unlikely. It would spelled correctly [wikipedia.org].
I love that a post complaining about spelling has such horrible grammar.
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The way I figure it, the next logical search after the last one would been:
"ashley madison"
Re:First Polanski (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe they should have showed a big spinning clock, or a caption at the bottom of the screen that says "IN CASE YOU CAN'T FIGURE IT OUT, TIME WOULD ACTUALLY BE PASSING BETWEEN EACH SEARCH!! GET IT?"
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They should have shown the Google home page on a monitor while the backdrop changes after each search, and provide some indicator of how much time has past in between in each search
Good point. For example, they could have had the Google logo change, which it actually does on a regular basis.
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Perhaps they targeted the markets, I do live near a major Delta Hub.
Re:First Polanski (Score:5, Funny)
It's just you. Any idiot could see the story: An American guy went to study abroad in Paris, went to a cafe, met a French girl who told him he was cute, bought her some chocolate, found out about her favorite films, and eventually moved to Paris to be the handyman to her and her husband.
Re:First Polanski (Score:5, Funny)
It's just you. Any idiot could see the story: An American guy went to study abroad in Paris, went to a cafe, met a French girl who told him he was cute, bought her some chocolate, found out about her favorite films, and eventually moved to Paris to be the handyman to her and her husband.
Ah to be the handyman in a Parisian family... you have all the sex with the Mrs, but none of the responsibility of raising/paying for the children.
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Here are the searches from the commercial, in order:
[SNIP]
Ack, dude, spoiler warning, spoiler warning!
What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Major company runs television ad during profitable sports event.
Gasp. Newsworthy indeed.
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
For a company that doesn't advertise very much (all that they have so far is that stupid Chrome browser commercial [youtube.com] that still barely makes sense to me), and a company that's pretty closely tied to the /. community, I think it's pretty newsworthy. And let's not forget that they didn't just crawl into the advertising realm - their first major ad on TV airing during the Super Bowl? That's pretty significant. And besides, it suggests that Google is starting to acknowledge some competition from Bing. They never had any reason to advertise much before, but it shows that they acknowledge that things are starting to change.
In any case, for a night full of silly car ads and tasteless beer commercials, I thought it was delightfully refreshing. I'm glad to see a story like this making waves.
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Searching for Superbowl Ads for your iPod ? There's an app for that !
Wait... (Score:2)
Man, where is the world going...
France? Football? Google? (Score:2)
Jeff Jarvis [twitter.com]: "Disappointed Google didn't make a new commercial appropriate to the Super Bowl. France? Football? Google?"
Interested in something else. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Interested in something else. (Score:4, Informative)
Try google DNS [google.com].
No, I'm not joking.
I upgraded everything, but still found that it took very long to begin loading a page.
A heavily 'ad-laden' page has to make many DNS queries before the page even starts to appear.
Google DNS is an order of magnitude faster than the one provided with my Bell WiMax.
But make sure you test it first. Your ISP's DNS might not be as bad as mine.
Those who ask, receive! (Score:5, Funny)
Haven't you heard of Google TiSP?
http://www.google.com/tisp/ [google.com]
I wonder why they didn't advertise this - everyone already uses google search.
And for those wondering, Clearwire is just a franchise of Google TiSP
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This was one of the company's many April 1 jokes.
Even more interesting (Score:5, Funny)
Just type the word "Why"
First suggested results:
Why do men have nipples
Why is the sky blue
Why is my poop green
Why are black people so loud
Recently bumped off the top list of suggested search results: "Why does my vag smell"
What would we do with out such an enormous cultural asset such as Google?
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Well, some of these are introduced through deliberate organized campaigns to get funny and/or offensive things to show up as autocompletes for common terms. Not Google's fault per se in that case either, but it does mean that Google's presenting the user with not-very-useful information, as they've failed to filter out ungenuine searches.
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Re:Even more interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Why the hell are these not legitimate questions? What is wrong with trying to find out more about the world, as opposed to staying willfully ignorant of topics that might seem vaguely uncomfortable?
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Go to google, type "Why" and you'll also get:
"why can't i own a canadian"
I guess in some places that's a pretty legitimate question...
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It's referring to various biblical/torah passages that seemingly condone slavery. Many religious people use old testament/torah passages as justification for homophobia and this "can I own a Canadian?" [google.com] un-sourced letter in particular was a response to that sentiment.
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Re:Even more interesting (Score:5, Funny)
Boy, people here are more bizarrely weird than I thought.
This is the internet, may I ask what it is that you were expecting?
Re:Even more interesting (Score:5, Funny)
This is the internet, may I ask what it is that you were expecting?
The Spanish Inquisition.
Re:Even more interesting (Score:5, Funny)
Are you sure that your results are not based on your personal search history :)
Re:Even more interesting (Score:4, Funny)
This was even in the ad and it made me chuckle:
"how to assemble a crossbow"
I think consciously they left it in as a nod to the asocial male geek set.
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Well count me in with the "Why can't I own a Canadian?" group.
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Yeah, it was interesting the suggestions that they chose to include and remove. I think the one that stuck out to me was their suggestion for 'How' omits 'How I met your mother' on the commercial. I'm sure that there are other examples. Shouldn't raise any eyebrows really, but obviously they wanted to hold back from appearing to endorse anything through their suggestions
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Even funnier when you start with:
"How do I get my"
"Why does my"
These give better results in when you reside in US. Luckily I can replicate them in Safari's google search box (but not in google.fi page):
"How do I get my sister/mother to sleep with me"
"How do I get my mom to spank me"
"How do I get my mom to stop drinking"
"How do I get my boyfriend to kiss me"
"How do I get my boyfriend to propose me"
"How do I get my cat to stop peeing everywhere"
"How do I get my dog to stop eating poop"
"Why does my belly butto
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Even more interesting (Score:5, Informative)
What would we do with out such an enormous cultural asset such as Google?
Why do men have nipples? [amazon.com] is a humor book. It's a New York Times Bestseller.
If you don't like that query, blame the New York Times, or blame the author of that book. Don't blame Google. The same goes for the rest of those queries, you can probably blame the rest of those queries on TV Quiz shows, or on people trying to game the system. In any case, "why" is a super-vague query, most people enter quite a few more meaningful keywords. Judging Google on that criterion alone just tells us more about you than anything it tells us about Google.
Am I the only one...? (Score:5, Insightful)
...who thought this ad was pretty damn brilliant? Low-key, sure, but also sweet, memorable, and focused on the product/service itself rather than hype and glitz? I thought it promoted the both the company's values and the value of what they provide to their customers extraordinarily well.
Maybe I'm just not cynical enough, but it sure gets my vote. /tsg/
Re:Am I the only one...? (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife and I thought it was well done as well. We've also recently gone to Paris... and it brought back good memories for us.
I think it did a beautiful job of showing the service off... and reminding people that Google still works and is extremely efficient. It didn't need to be all in your face and loud... unlike other search engine adds. (Yaaaaaaaaaaahooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
I'm sure it will get ripped apart here on Slashdot... but it definitely wasn't aimed at the Geek crowd.
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I beg to differ. In fact, the majority of comments here appear to be overwhelmingly positive. Maybe we're just a little more soft-hearted than you give us credit.
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Re:Am I the only one...? (Score:5, Informative)
I saw it on Google (Score:3, Interesting)
I have heard that already. Some people get the impression that anything you reach through Google is on Google. And I've heard people complain when they find Google "hosting" a site with offensive material.
I liked the commercial. It tells people that Google is still doing very cool and useful things with simple text instead of pretty pictures and vast advertising campaign
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It was a great ad on many levels. For one, its emotional content countered the Bing! attack (of claiming more relevant results), without appearing to be defensive.
If you want to be cynical, point out how the slashdot summary is pandering to its own stereotypes and in so doing missing the point entirely.
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I thought it was excellent as well. Why I even watched part of the game I don't know, but I'm glad I did because I really enjoyed this ad. I don't even remember any of the others, and I was actually watching them, not getting a sandwich (saved that for the actual game). Others have pointed out what's brilliant about it already.
It struck a personal chord for me, since I fell in love overseas recently myself and am at a certain point in the relationship that's covered in the ad, and it makes me hopeful that i
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No you are not the only one. I think it's very sweet and touching.
Re:Am I the only one...? (Score:4, Insightful)
It was a love story in 30 seconds told through Google search queries and results. It was absolutely brilliant. I don't think I've ever seen anything quite like it.
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Google could bend you over and give it to you up the ass and you would tell us what an amazing experience it was.
Your thinking Apple.
I loved the ad. (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, I liked it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I thought it was simple and to the point (something you don't see very much in Super Bowl ads).
I didn't watch the Superbowl (cable's out), and so far three friends have called me to tell me to watch this ad, while I haven't heard a peep about any of the other ads that aired. I'd qualify that as a pretty significant success.
Also consider that the ad's simplistic nature can be thought of as a reflection of Google's products. Apple's used same strategy very successfully while marketing the iPhone, albeit from a somewhat different angle.
I also wouldn't list Apple's '1984' as a particularly good ad. It was expensive, confusing, and made absolutely no mention of the product being advertised. My favorite super bowl ad is still the E-Trade monkey ad [youtube.com].
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"I also wouldn't list Apple's '1984' as a particularly good ad. It was expensive, confusing, and made absolutely no mention of the product being advertised."
Yet here we are, still talking about it years later. It is the definition of a good ad. It evokes curiosity, and people talked about it. They told two friends, and so on. The end of the ad basically said that Apple would be releasing the Mac. That was pretty much all that was needed.
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My favorite is the "shooting gerbils through the O in outpost" [youtube.com] ad - for its blatent disregard for political correctness, its originality, and its appreciation for humor.
1984 wasn't all that great - to get much out of it you had to be somewhat familiar with George Orwell's book.
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Indeed. I don't have an ATSC box. I'll likely be getting an antenna and box one of these days, and hopefully canceling the cable.
Strip clubs in Paris (Score:2)
ATM machines in Paris
How to make quick cash in Paris
Where is the consulate in Paris?
How to say "I am broke" to French airline official
Homeless life for foreign nationals in paris
What can I say? I would have made better use of the weekend in Paris than this dude did.
Best Ever? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh gawd. That ad was based around a lame, confusing reference to a certain novel — a novel that the makers obviously had not read. It doesn't make sense to anybody who doesn't already think that Apple products are Destined to Save the World. Anybody who thinks this is "best ever" needs to get out more.
Re:Best Ever? (Score:5, Funny)
Jeez, I didn't expect to get modded up. Is everybody feeling OK?
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Oh gawd. That ad was based around a lame, confusing reference to a certain novel -- a novel that the makers obviously had not read. It doesn't make sense to anybody who doesn't already think that Apple products are Destined to Save the World. Anybody who thinks this is "best ever" needs to get out more.
What was the computing industry like back then? I've always wanted to hear from someone familiar with the industry at the time to explain what that ad was getting at.
You mean get out less, right?
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You've heard of the novel "1984"? I don't think I've ever met anybody who didn't. Executive summary: big mean people run the world, control people's minds with lies, propaganda, and general meanness. There's a lot more to the novel than that, but that's usually all anybody cares to know about, along with conflating the imaginary dictatorship in the novel with whatever government you like least — the commies if you're an anti-commie, or the U.S. government if you're pissed off about red light cameras.
S
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You must be new here (in the Apple reality distortion bubble). ^^
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I guess I just don't know how to think different [yimg.com]. BTW, does anybody know what model Mac the Mahatma used?
Holy shit, Google knows everything about him! (Score:5, Funny)
I Don't Get It (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I Don't Get It (Score:5, Funny)
Why not Chrome? (Score:3, Interesting)
Doesn't everyone already use google search? Wouldn't they have gotten much more bang for the buck with a Chrome ad?
Re:Why not Chrome? (Score:5, Insightful)
Autocomplete Search Results (Score:2)
Did anyone freeze frames on those search autocompletes? I saw one that said "Who is the antichrist?" I was hoping to see some more nasty stuff, but they were censored out. Sopmeone should compare the TV ad. and the real search engine results. [grin]
Re:Autocomplete Search Results (Score:5, Funny)
Who the fuck is Sopmeone?
Yeah, hi. Sopmeone here. I did compare the results but you won't be interested. Nice meeting you.
I thought it was sweet. (Score:4, Funny)
I thought it was a sweet ad. At the end, though, I had him googling "divorce lawyer."
Ads (Score:2)
Googles ad was one of the better ones imo. Only a few other standouts and both of them were beer commercials. Course ymmv on what you consider good.
On a side not I was pleased to see that CBS did at least reach a compromise with their...lets say selective censorship and only ran a very short Tim Tebow ad as opposed to something longer and more dogmatic.
Disclamer: I'm a Florida Gator, I like Tim a lot, I'm also a (weak) atheist who is pro-choice.
More Search Stories (Score:5, Informative)
That ad is fucking awesome (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't get the criticism of the Google ad, I thought it was just perfect.
It has a story.
The story is not offensive, but rather personal and endearing.
There is a positive message.
There is a happy end (since we're expecting a baby any day, I am quite biased on this one).
And google is there, from the very beginning, like a faithful, useful, reliable friend.
I think this ad has genius written all over it.
Chuck Norris (Score:5, Funny)
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