Someone recently pointed me to the rather ominous sounding Google Blackout. The site has a black background and huge white numbers that count down. Some quick math reveals that the number is what appears to be the number of seconds until January 1st, 2008.

What’s also curious is that if you turn off JavaScript and refresh the page, the countdown is replaced with “37* 25′ 38″, -122* 5′ 57″, which would appear to be GPS coordinates. Coordinates for what, you ask? You guessed it: Google Headquarters.

A WHOIS comes up empty. It’s private registered through Dreamhost.

I did notice that the default RSS feed for the page seems to be pointing at http://feeds.technorati.com/search/Google, but I doubt highly that Technorati has anything to do with it.

So…what is this? A cheap P.R. stunt? Some crazy-ass A.R.G? Terrorism? Who knows? I’ll update if I figure anything else out.

While the two images above may look identical, the image on the left is actually a Google Search Appliance. The image on the right…well, that’s something else.

It would seem that the Google Search Appliance comes in three sizes. There’s The Cheatbox, The Cheatserver and The Cheatrack. You can use them to seemlessly search your whole Cheaterprize!

Seriously, that’s way more than a passing resemblance. I’m thinking someone owes The Brothers Chaps some money on this one. Either that or they could just recolor The Cheat, like so:



I’m guessing the result would be called “The Choogle”, but that’s just wild speculation. What’s curious is that Choogle.com is registered and pointing at the real thing, but the domain isn’t owned by google.