Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo Map Engineers Prank Google
pete314 writes "Yahoo engineers apparently couldn't help themselves, and Yahoo Maps had a great prank on the folks at Google. The beta of the new Yahoo Maps for a short while listed 'The Dude's Fish Store' at 1600 Amphiteatre Parkway in Mountain View, CA. The address is better known as the headquarters for Yahoo's competitor Google." From the post: "The phone number listed is for guy named Ruben Suterwitz (or that's what it sounds like on his voicemail). His voicemail gives the option to get assistance, forwarding callers to the Google front desk. There are several hints pointing to a Google prank. The search engine's co-founder Sergey Brin was born in Russia and both he and his buddy Larry Page were students at Stanford when they founded the company. "
I'll wait for google guys response, to have the complete laugh. Meanwhile, i'll keep looking for the fish store...
//WR
Cool! With Google, MSN and Yahoo I can have maps on three different computers now!
(...continues reading his buzzword magazin...)
What are the chances that Yahoo engineers did this vs. the chances some third party setup a yahoo.biz website for "The Dude's Fish Store" and Yahoo! Maps indexed it and added it to their mapping system? I vote for the third party candidate.
Seems to me its easy for anyone to setup a site with Yahoo and it would be easy for Yahoo to use data already in their systems to make their map more complete or even just as a starting point for adding data to the new system. Unless its part of Google's unique business strategy, I doubt their website is hosted by Yahoo and as easily added to the dataset.
When I read this in somebody's blog about twelve hours ago, it seemed like this was actually a moderately elaborate prank on Yahoo (there was a website attached to the fictional company at Google address, etc.). It seemed more like somebody had created this fake Website to see whose auto-mapping services would put that fake company at this address.
But maybe I just didn't look very carefully and I'm an idiot?
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Forget about the pranks; it's the new Maps APIs that deserve attention. Not only can you create JavaScript/Ajax maps like with the Google API, but you can also embed Flash maps in your pages or even your own Flash applications. And there's a free geocoder.
Rasmus Lerdorf has a handy tutorial on using this stuff with PHP.
I worked there are year ago, across the road from google and it's a total dump. One of the reasons I left : Too many ants all over the place.
Yahoo's place in Sunnyvale used to be nice, not been there for a while though.
The only useful thing Google really does is the valet parking for employees, otherwise, the stock is over priced.
I wonder if 4 years from now we'll be referring to a 'google bubble' ?
Yeah, yeah, there goes my positive karma.
... some comedy between rival companies and not flames like Sun vs. Dell I enjoy the busting each others balls in good fun...... but the whole putting them in a vice. Brings back eerie memories of my last girlfriend.
I just want to say, this prank is hilarious -.-
Where else in Yahoo's new map service are there hidden pranks (a.k.a., bad information) that only the Yahoo insiders know about?
why don't they just leave the maps thing alone - the market is saturated
Yeah, because now they'll just keep competing with each other, each trying to outdo the rest, In the end, the only people who'll benefit from that situation will be the bloody users.
That would suck, wouldn't it?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Knowing that people munge the maps makes me feel not so bad. The other day I looked at a map of my house and in the description it said "Loserville. Population: You."
yahoo has been in the maps game longer than google. multipoint directions is cool, now if only you didn't need to download a windows program to get that kind of multi point functionality...
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
You'd think they could afford a special panther, to take care of the problem.
You know, one that comes with its own soundtrack. Bright pink?
Dead ants! Dead ants! Dead ants dead ants dead ants, dead ants Dead ANNNTS...
I don't think that is it because the contact info on the fish site doesnt list the Google address. It lists another address (where no business is located). If Yahoo had used the data provided by the fish site, as you are suggesting, then it would have placed the business at 1600 Middlefield Rd, Mountain View, CA, no?
IMHO, TFA is correct, this is a prank by a Yahoo employee.
I drove all the way up there hoping to buy some fish!
qntm.org
They were just trying to bait Google...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
And while we're on the subject, what's with all those Linux distros. We have Redhat, Ubuntu, Suse, Debian, Knoppix, etc etc. Enough already.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
I surely hope so. Over here in Netherlands the available online maps are horrible compared to both MS's and Google's. If they would just extend their databases to the rest of the world...
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
I think their interface is just much simplier. And like madaxe42 says above, there are already a ton of map services.
KeepTrackOfIt.com - Find the lowest gas prices in your area graphically
Pity Google didn't bite...
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
I'd prefer them to put their efforts towards innovating in new fields than trying to follow google's every step poorly
as much as the next guy. But YYahoo's maps seem to be implemented better than Google. You can zoom in and out with the mouse whhel, and in Google, Maps w/ Firefox, I invariably, on multiple machines, get vacant squares, and I have to drag the map around this way and that to get the data filled in. Yahoo just works much more smoothly.
Just thought I'd mention that the new Flash virtual machine coming out in a few months time is about 5-10X faster by Macromedia's claims, and these claims have been backed up by users of the public alpha (myself included). The days of Flash killing your CPU cycles may soon be history.
By buying Yahoo! and razing it to the ground.
What a lame prank! now if they had tp's googles hq I would be impressed..
so why link to http://www.stanford.edu/ and http://google.com/ on the links page? and post a gmail account [or should it be googlemail.co.uk over here ...]
How is this a prank? Since when is making your own service unrealiable in terms of the information it provides a "prank"? If I make fun of someone on a website, am I pranking them? A prank is when you make someone look like an idiot at THEIR expense, not the person doing the prank.
blog & fiction: jd87
This might not be a prank.
0 829ta_talk_alford
About 2 weeks ago, news stories were circulating regarding how dictionaries and encyclopedias deliberately insert false entries into their compendiums. They do this to catch obvious theft of their information.
There remains the possibility that GOOGLE themselves or another company that keeps map data has inserted their own false information.
Here's a refresher article on the false entries in dictionaries/encyclopedias: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/05
When microsoft just airbrushed apple off of their satellite maps it may have been an attempt to be funny but it was basically petty.
If yahoo had done this to Google's own maps on the Google site that would have been vandalism not necesarily a prank.
That they went to the trouble of putting up a fake voicemail and other humourous details puts it in the realm of a prank rather than a childish tantrum. Whether you find it funny, that's up to you. There's a thin line between humour and malice, but basically humour is important because it is a legitimate way to air a grievence in a relatively socially acceptable manner.
I don't think this totally undermines Yahoo's credibility. If you needed to get to the Google campus you still could. If you were looking for the Google number, you'd probably Google it anyways.
If anything it actually gives them credibility because it brings them back to the roots of what Yahoo! and the early net was about when it was built in the dorms -- fun.
They just like the fish and are suggesting people go there for lunch...
While I'm not going to even bother with the "Google did something, so why why does anyone bother" stuff, another reason that you should be glad Yahoo is in the maps/local space is that it might finally give Google Local a kick in the pants to become useful. Google Maps is by far the best maps product out there, but compared to Yahoo Local, their Local product is really anemic. There are some man features on Yahoo Local that I couldn't imagine being without and the fact that I still can't even sort by distance on Google Local seems silly. Maybe Google should just leave the "local thing alone".
These wacky CS people and their abstract names for things. Why can't they be like perl and call them hashes?
Program Intellivision!
Looks like the Dudes also have a website http://ca.local.yahoo.biz/thedudesfishstore
I think there are enoug MIT folks at Google that they felt it necessary to omit any mention of a certain other Cambridge, MA college, though there is a label for its former women's branch, Radcliffe College.
That's a pretty lame prank, actually.
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/
Did you guys read at the end of TFA that the screenshots were taken from a Google Cache: Screenshots from Google for a story on Yahoo playing prank on Google.
...
That can also be seen as
Google: I have got your screen shots in my cache now, I will never forget it. Revenge will be mine
Yahoo: nyann nyann nyannn
Does anyone actually use yahoo anymore? I mean seriously I only go to yahoo on accident. I couldn't even tell you what the front page looks like.
Ok, so...pranks are great and all, but...it's important that they actually be FUNNY. "The Dude's Fish Store?" Oh yeah, that's real clever.
"The Dude's Fish Store" at 1600 Amphiteatre Parkway in Mountain View, CA.
Speaking of bad pranks at 1600...
Did anyone else immediately think of Pennsylvania Avenue?
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
That's the worst prank I've ever seen. "OMG TaHTS NOT GOGGLE THTAS A FSIH SToRZ!!!!!!!1111!!!ONE!!"
yes, very handy for us travelling salesmen....
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
They should have made it a library or a book store, instead of a fish store.
maybe it just smelled fishy to them?
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.