Toilet Humor From Google AdWords CAPTCHA

Mar 20, 2007 at 9:56am ET by Danny Sullivan

We descend now into Beavis and Butthead territory, but a reader sent this in, and it gave me a chuckle for the same reason it did him. When signing up for AdWords, he was presented with a CAPTCHA code — an image of letters that you enter to prove you’re not some automated system hitting Google:

The code? Down at the bottom in the big read letters: "PNESS." Go on, read it aloud, if you don’t get it. Heh, heh, you said penis. Shut up, Butthead. Well, I suppose it’s better than the correct spelling.

Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series, maintains a personal blog called Daggle and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan.

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7 COMMENTS ON Toilet Humor From Google AdWords CAPTCHA

tzd123, March 20th, 2007 at 10:09 am ET:

Funny.

bobob, March 20th, 2007 at 11:04 am ET:

This is more widespread; I remember when I signed up for Gmail in 2004 there was a CAPTCHA along these lines, so I cycled through more of them to see if it was a fluke or an intended GJoke – there were quite a few vaguely toilet-related CAPTCHAs!

X-Ride, March 20th, 2007 at 11:12 am ET:

That is funny :) imagine some old granny having to type that in…

timsen, March 20th, 2007 at 11:42 am ET:

Fear teh mighty secret Captcha Message!

seomysterious, March 20th, 2007 at 2:15 pm ET:

Beavis here. This was funny mostly because it was not just a randomly-generated CAPTCHA message. It appears on an Adwords sign up instruction page at https://adwords.google.com/select/steps.html

TheDame, March 20th, 2007 at 4:02 pm ET:

I imagine you’ve seen this one, too:
http://www.ajit1.com/2007/02/02/google-accounts-needs-a-retard-to-confirm/

Oden, March 20th, 2007 at 5:29 pm ET:

That is funny. I’m sure will see more of these. I imagine it won’t take long until we see a bunch of websites devoted to funny captcha images…(hey there’s an idea – don’t steal it! Haha)

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