Google's Rare Homepage Push for Droid

Do you see something strange in this screenshot of Google’s homepage today? No, not Bert and Ernie (it’s Sesame Street’s 40th birthday). It’s that ad for the Verizon Droid right there under the search box (today is also Droid Day). Although, the juxtaposition does make it seem like Bert and Ernie are trying to get you to buy a Droid.

Google’s homepage is normally an ad-free zone. No more than 28 words are allowed on it, and Google is always trying to find ways to make it even sparer.

But the company does make exceptions now and then to promote a partner’s product, such as it did with Firefox back in the day and with the launch of the very first Android phone from T-Mobile a year ago. And at least this Droid ad does not break the 28-word rule. The page weighs in at 27 words.

The ad goes to this Google landing page, which then links to Verizon’s Droid page. I guess they want to lose some folks along the way. Still, I’d love to see the clickthrough rates on that promotion.

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[spald_fr:]

from Wikipedia:

Twenty-eight is a composite number, its proper divisors being 1, 2, 4, 7, and 14.

Twenty-eight is classed as a perfect number because it is the sum of all it's divisors, and the sum of the totient function for the first nine integers.

Twenty-eight is not the aliquot sum of any number other than itself and is therefore not a component in an aliquot sequence.

Twenty-eight is the second perfect number. As a perfect number, it is related to the Mersenne prime 7, since 22(23 - 1) = 28. The next perfect number is 496, the previous being 6.

Since the greatest prime factor of 282 + 1 = 785 is 157, which is more than 28 twice, 28 is a Størmer number.

Twenty-eight is a harmonic divisor number, a happy number, a triangular number, a hexagonal number,and a centered nonagonal number.

It appears in the Padovan sequence, preceded by the terms 12, 16, 21 (it is the sum of the first two of these).

It is also a Keith number, because it recurs in a Fibonacci-like sequence started from its base 10 digits: 2, 8, 10, 18, 28...

Twenty-eight is the third positive integer with a prime factorization of the form 22q where q is an odd prime.

Twenty-eight is the ninth and last number in early Indian magic square of order 3.

There are twenty-eight convex uniform honeycombs.

Twenty-eight is the only positive integer that has a unique Kayles nim-value.

Twenty-eight is the atomic number of nickel.

Nov 06 03:18 PM

[Tom B:]

"Although, the juxtaposition does make it seem like Bert and Ernie are trying to get you to buy a Droid."

Sock puppets worked great for "Pets.com"-- not!

It's great Google can get such a widely-seen billboard for their message, but it will take more than that to move a platform as anemic and poorly conceived as the Droid 2.0. They need to understand the difference between "playing to the geeks at Google, Inc" and designing products with broad appeal.

Nov 09 12:37 PM