Subject:
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Something Google Doesn’t Want You to See
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.mediawatch
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Date:
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Wed, 21 May 2008 21:36:16 GMT
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Viewed:
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6785 times
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Something Google Doesn’t Want You to See
By Jennifer 8. Lee
So, City Room can do our version of bloggy investigative reporting, too.
Google loves Lego. After all, Larry Page built a printer out of Lego blocks when
he was a student. Google honored Lego’s 50th birthday with its own illustrated
Google Lego logo (which an inspired fan turned into a real Google Lego logo).
Google’s New York offices even commissioned a Lego artist, Sean Kenney, to do a
piece that seemed simple from afar, but more complex as you got close. And
Google’s first disk drives (before the turn of the millennium) were all modded
out with the colorful building blocks; the cases that were sold at the time were
really expensive. (Interesting fact: Back then, Google was too cheap to buy real
Lego blocks; they were actually generic Costco building blocks, but they were
Lego-like in spirit.)
So it’s no wonder, perhaps, that the Chelsea offices of Google — which we have
visited several times and where the cafeterias serve free lunches — have a whole
area devoted to elaborately constructed works made of Lego blocks. Impressed,
this City Room reporter wanted to write an article about them.
googleA replica of the Chelsea building where Google’s New York offices are
housed. Enlarge this image.
We thought it wouldn’t be a problem. Google officials discourage photography in
their offices, but they had been eager enough to brag about their Chelsea space
in The Times’s dead-tree editions in the past. And some lower-quality photos of
the Google Lego creations already were already out on the Internet.
First we sent a polite request through a friend to Google’s local P.R. office,
and were “ix-nayed,” as the friend informed us.
Hmm. Odd. But then this City Room reporter bumped into Employee No. 3 (yes, as
in the first person hired after Larry and Sergey) and asked him to put in a
request to the P.R. department again. Perhaps a request from on high, could gets
things moving. The person who answered his request initially seemed very nice,
but then we got an e-mail message back:
We get many requests from the media for photographs of various locations in
our office, including the Lego area. Unfortunately, aren’t able to say yes to
all of them.
Ouch! Disappointed but not deterred, City Room has stealthily waited for
high-quality photos of the Google creations to come our way.
googleLego portraits of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, as well as
computer scientist Brian Kernighan, at the Chelsea office. Enlarge this image.
And we finally obtained some images of the most elaborate Lego art, including
portraits of Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Brian Kernighan. (If you have to ask
who Brian Kernighan is, you are not meant to be a Google engineer.) We also
obtained an image of the Lego representation of the Chelsea office building in
which Google’s New York offices are housed.
The building was actually constructed by an engineer named Mike Epstein (who was
not our source for the photos). It took him a few late nights, with help from
some co-workers.
The Google logo by Sean Kenney, pictured above (and not to be confused with
other Google Lego logos), was installed in April 2007 and is made up of 5,300
Lego pieces of more unusual nature than the square blocks.
(To be safe, we didn’t have any of these pictures e-mailed to any of our Gmail
accounts. You never know who is watching you.)
Here is the link to the page:
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/something-google-doesnt-want-you-to-see/index.html?partner=rssnyt&scp=1&sq=lego+google&st=blog
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Something Google Doesn’t Want You to See
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| (...) lol - gotta love the comments to this article... Having gotten Google’s attention already they know everything about you already down to your sexual fantasies which can be inferred from the dead tree and electonic media you access. — Posted by (...) (16 years ago, 21-May-08, to lugnet.mediawatch, FTX)
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