Easter Egg: Arrested Development

On Arrested Development, they showed someone doing a query on a fake search engine, InfoMole, for [jet pants]. I can tell that they used Google-like results because of the snippets, and then they added a new navbar at the top to complete the InfoMole look. Quite cute.

But the funny part is the ads on the right-hand side. The bottom-most ad says something like “buy all the merchandise for Arrested Development at blablabla.” You pretty much have to freeze-frame to see it. Whoever mocked up the fake search results did a little extra work to put a nice easter egg in there. Kudos, anonymous easter egg person!

36 Responses to Easter Egg: Arrested Development (Leave a comment)

  1. Aww if only I had watched it. Would have been cool seeing the easter egg — though I’m not sure I would have even caught it myself! But I guess I would have come here and thought back and realized 🙂 Anyways, you found the easter egg? Quite observant you are 😀

  2. I did notice the Google-like SE they were using, especially the “Did you mean jetpacks?” line at the top. I wish I would have known about the ad before watching it, though. Oh well. Viva la Arrested Development!

  3. Whats arrested development?

  4. Nice find Matt. I love to watch for this kinda stuff on TV.

  5. Not a HUGE arrested development fan, but David Cross is among the most funny people alive.

  6. I love that show! One of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. Didn’t catch that part last night though, I was way too depressed and scared to paid that close of attention as it seems my site which was doing good all of sudden has fallen out of favor with J3 why I have no idea. But watching a full hour last did get my mind off of it a bit and cheered me up a little. Wish I had though to tape it though.

    Which one is David Cross? The father? Tobias?

  7. matthew stephens

    david cross is tobias.

    and arrested development is known for it’s little easter eggs. last year they showed the uncle in jail, being imprisoned for his twin brother’s crime. he claimed to have started a blog pleading his innocence. if you freeze frame the blog screenshot, there are tons of hilarious entries and taglines in the blog.

    best show on television right now.

  8. CSI: Miami (and maybe others) do a fake search engine as well by forget what they call theirs… something like Dig.Info… I will have to pay closer attention next time. Why do they do this? is there some sort of wierd law that they could get sued for showing google results or something?

    You really do love your Tivo don’t ya… I have a BrightHouse HD DVR and love it especially for only $6 a month!

  9. ” Why do they do this? is there some sort of wierd law that they could get sued for showing google results or something?”

    I think it has more to do with promoting another company for free.

    Would you sue if someone used your web site on National TV and promoted it to millions of people at no cost to you?

  10. I think it has more to do with promoting another company for free.

    And viewers are saying “don’t these people know about Google?” I would drop a brick if I ever saw one of these shows using Excite or HotBot LOL.

  11. I posted a good helping of highlights (Tobias-heavy) here:

    http://malcontent.typepad.com/malcontent/2005/11/arrested_develo.html

  12. First of all one of the best AD episodes in a long-time.. secondly as soon as I saw that infomole site, I wanted the domain. I went and checked on its availability right away. 🙂 I will have to back and double-check the ads on the side, as I didn’t see that. But they are very good with the subtleties.

  13. Or webcrawler…

    I don’t think its fair for a tv show or movie to show some companies for free while charge others like Pepsi or Coke just to get a placement in the movie.

  14. you think they’d at least have registered infomole.com for their own right?

    How many people do you think went there after they saw it? I did.

    King of the Hill got this right years ago by registering peggysfeet.com before doing a show that talked about it.

    It’s since been taken over by a foot fetish or travel site or something…

    It’s too bad, because the flash they had there was actually amusing.

    But I think it’s a great, effective, form of marketing that doesn’t cost too much at all.

  15. who’s david cross!!?! shame!

  16. Gudmoning Matts,

    I have a query that lots of my website’s recently went to the google’s automated index (supplimental results). I am little confused that is this all due to the jaggers.
    Looking forward to ur reply for above.

    Regards,
    Mohit

  17. I think it is perfectly fair. Some products are just more worthy than others. Just like only some sites qualify for premium Adsense publisher status.

  18. arrested development have mentioned and shown google results before so i doubt they changed it to avoid any copyright/legal issues. i imagine it was more of an inside joke with the writers (plus with tobias being a mole and all that)!. btw, i really dig the show, one of the best on tv at the moment (behind carnivale and deadwood).

  19. Hi Matt,

    This is an incredibly tenuous connection to what you’re talking about, but I just suddenly needed to ask you something.

    In Google, can you do a backlink search while excluding links from a particular domain? If that makes any sense. I mean, it works logically how you might expect it to in Y and MSN –

    [link:domain.com -site:domain.com]

    But not, at least with the few permutations I cared to try, in G?

    And um, the tenuous connection is that this is about search queries, and you mentioned the word ‘query’ at least once in your post…

  20. It would make sense that

    link:www.bleh.com -inurl:bleh

    would work, but you’re right it doesn’t seem to.

    I think this has to do with google being protective of their backlinks. You’ll notice they don’t show all of them either.

    I could write a php or perl script that scrapes google and removes all that stuff in about 10 minutes, but Matt and the people at Google probably wouldn’t like that so I won’t.

    They should provide an rss feed like MSN does. I have so many cool uses for things I’d love to do with the google API, but the query limit makes none of them practical.

  21. I’ve been watching some sites in some fairly large niches and I’ve been amazed at how successful a low-quality (as far as user value and trustworthiness is concerned), spammy site can get to be via…article submissions.

    This one bozo I’m watching is submitting literally hundreds of variations of just 5 five separate articles to hordes of different articles sites. I naively concluded he wouldn’t get anywhere because the links were from non-authority sites and the articles are vomit-like dupes of each other.

    This is what I’ve found: on msn and google he has been sailing to the top of a 15 million page serp. I guess as far as google is concerned, since the backlinks are coming from on-topic pages (obviously, since the articles that provide him his backlinks are related to his homepage topic), the links are deemed relevant and hence worthy (link text surrounded by ontopic wordage).

    This is pretty sad really. I thought only msn was this easily manipulable. What it really means is that anyone who wants to write about a hundred pages of crap and then submit them to about 20 articles sites for the purpose of getting backlinks(100 x 20 = 2000 backlinks)can get to a high position in almost any niche.

    The only thing that the spammer has to do is what this guy is doing:

    1. build a crap site.

    2. submit it to every freaking directory there is (hundreds)

    3. submit hundreds of articles (just write 5 and then make 20 variations) to articles sites.

    4. don’t worry about being in the sandbox because when you come out, you’ll do “just fine”.

    GG, ASA, I hope you read this. Because it is scary how easy it is to game google with this technique.

    Personal recommendation: seriously consider compiling a list of known articles sites and zero their pagerank to eliminate. Many of the article sites are good sites. But, unfortunately, they are being used as tools to quite easily game google.

  22. I should have known you were an “Arrested Development” fan. What a great show! How about that “Molezilla” showdown with Tobias and George Michael in the jet pants? Heehee.

    By the way, you said, ““buy all the merchandise for Arrested Development at blablabla.” Ok, say the new attorney’s name (played by Scott Baio who replaced Henry Winkler) out loud…Bob Loblaw. Too mcuh fun.

    Getting ready to watch those two episodes again for the third time since Monday.

  23. just curious, what are these article sites you’re talking about? I want to try a little experiment. It’ll be fun… don’t worry 🙂

  24. I have to wonder if some of the people here with serp rankings problems are because their site is as off-topic as their comments to this particular blog entry?

    🙂

  25. Hey, I never said I had serp problems. But then again, unlike my comments, my sites ARE on topic.

  26. Best show ever…it’s terrible that FOX is cancelling it (they already cut the season to only 13 episodes).

    Anyway, here is a screenshot of the JetPack web page. http://kaply.com/work/arresteddevff2.jpg

    If you look closely, you’ll notice it uses the Google favicon

  27. What an interesting describe about Easter Eggs below 🙂

    However, an Easter Egg might be accidentally harmful. For example, maybe there was a bug in the programmer’s Easter Egg code, and in certain situations it might crash the program, or even the whole computer, forcing you to reboot. I should note that I am not aware of ANY Easter Egg that has caused any harm like this, but I certainly admit the possibility, especially since Easter Eggs don’t go through the normal testing process.

  28. At least this is an example of TV getting something vaguely to do with computers looking right. One thing that really bugs me on the box or at the movies are things like:

    Independence Day – sure, we beat the aliens with a computer virus
    The Matrix – no, code doesn’t look like that
    Far too many TV shows and movies – When somebody gets an email, a voice will say “You have mail” and/or a giant envelope will appear on screen. How very 1997.

    I’ll stop there otherwise I’d be here ranting forever. Great post Matt.

  29. Bring back Arrested Development!

  30. Great post ! Easter Egg funny I think.

  31. Well maybe you guys should contact Arrested Development and have them use your search engine on another show. You can pay an advertisement fee. As if google really needs to advertise anyways. It’s so weird how back in the day such as the 90’s, I remember Google just being another search engine right along with lycos, and excite, and yahoo, and northern lights. Excite was the one I always used. Sometimes I even used northern lights. Now, google is like microsoft.

  32. Yeah. I think something needs to be done before google take over the entire world. Maybe I will google it to find a solution.

  33. I think it is perfectly fair. Some products are just more worthy than others. Just like only some sites qualify for premium Adsense publisher status.

  34. Hey! Arrested Development is my favorite show! I even have a whole website dedicated to these cool little hidden jokes. I didn’t know this one! Thanks man.

  35. I can’t believe you noticed that! It must be your extra sensory perception for all things google.

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