Did A Google Employee Just Register Hiybbprqag.com To Help Recruit New Employees?

That’s a screenshot of Google’s “Jobs” page, which can be found at https://www.google.com/intl/en/jobs/index.html. But it can also be reached by going to hiybbprqag.com, which does a 302 redirect to the Google.com URL.

Say what? And who? And why?

Let’s sort this out: “Hiybbprqag” is one of the nonsense words that Google used in its sting operation against Bing over the past few months. Our story was published on February 1st, the same day this domain was registered. (It’s also the same word that Stephen Colbert made famous on his show last night – February 2nd.)

It looks like the domain registrant is a Google employee working in the company’s Taipei office. According to DomainTools, Chih-Chung Chang registered the domain on February 1. His name may not be familiar, but that’s the same address listed on Google.com for the company’s office in Taipei.

Odd, isn’t it? Assuming this is a Google employee, we have to also assume he registered the domain on his own since it uses a personal name, not Google, as the registrant. And even though the search results pages are now filled with references to “hiybbprqag,” could the domain and redirect be some kind of way to attract any engineers/programmers who are digging into Google’s original experiment? Your guess is as good as mine.

Two things seem clear: 1) This episode gets stranger by the day, and 2) hiybbprqag has to be considered an early candidate for word of the year.

(tip via TC)