Google Ink Sends Ask.com New Google Pen


First Ask.com had some fun with Google earlier this month, joking about how their Google pen "flatlined" and ran out of ink during a crucial meeting. Now Google gets in on the joke in good spirit, sending Ask a new pen along with a letter discussing the Google Pen’s "redundant" architecture.

Ask.com’s Google Pen Service Restored from the Ask.com Blog share a picture of the pen and the letter, which offers Google’s apology for the pen failure. The letter reads:

We noted your suboptimal experience with our Google pen and are thus pleased to send you — at no charge — a replacement set.

Fortunately, our pen architecture is based upon Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Drafting Stuff. If any individual component fails, a quick recovery is ensured.

We wish you a long and happy writing experience.

The letter is almost certainly from Adam Lasnik of Google, the same person who sent Al Scillitani pain relief for his AdWords headaches. The title of the letter says, "search evangelist," which Adam uses. Danny also says the signature in the Ask letter, despite being smudged out, still looks pretty similar to the signature in the pain relief letter.

Search engines have a tendency to play games with each other. Yahoo, in the past, mocked the Google Dance for running out of beer at the 2004 party.



Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here.

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ONE COMMENT ON Google Ink Sends Ask.com New Google Pen

David Dalka,

This type of stuff is one reason why I love this industry, people know how to have fun with the smallest things.

I never witnessed this running out of beer event and based on the number of times I’ve seen that incident mentioned, I doubt I ever will in the future!




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