Sometimes I forget I’m a geek. Then I get a fortune cookie like
There will always be delightful
mysteries in your life.Lucky numbers: 10 22 25 19 31 41
and I immediately notice “Hmm. Those numbers could form an IP address of 102.225.193.141. Should I ping it?”
By the way, the best fortune cookie I ever got? It was a stock cookie from the fortune cookie factory, and it said
Kiss the person standing next to you.
How did it know I was standing by a pretty girl at the time? Nice. 
{ 65 comments… read them below or add one }
Best one I ever got:
“Your lucky number: Blue”
Am I the only one who hides “fortune cookies” (and more) in hidden text (ooops!! html comments don’t count as hidden text, do they?) on web pages? I keep waiting for someone to mail me because of what I have in there, ha ha.
By the way, do you have any record of the contents of the Google Sitemaps verification files? Those would be perfect carriers for fortune-cookie texts as well
Which reminds me of: http://www.articlesender.com/articles/article11.html
Another web page comment hider reporting in.
I check sites for comments, too.
Good evening Matt
“How did it know I was standing by a pretty girl at the time? Nice”
Are you sure it was a pretty girl ?
So did you ping it? I had to, since you brought it up.
My best fortune ever: “The road to knowledge begins with the turn of the page.”
Re: fortune cookies and “easter eggs” — I started a thread at WebmasterWorld a few months ago about hiding fun stuff in webpages. There were a lot of clever ideas out there:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum10/10555.htm
Hey Matt,
How’s the big-daddy update going?
I’m going to predict what Matt’s next fortune cookie will read (and I hope this works the way I fully intend for it to):
search engine optimization, search engine optimisation, expert search engine optimization, expert search engine optimisation, SEO, expert SEO, SEM, expert SEM, strategic SEO, strategic SEM, search injun optimization, search injuns, Googel, Googol, Viagra, Cialis, Levitra, phentermine, web design, design, designers, web designers, website designers, web site designers, custom site design, custom website design, custom web site design, web site designers
Damn…stripped out the CSS color style. Ah well, this still works.
Nice. I guess folks have seen the Silicon Zoo at
http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/index.html
Wow, I bet all the data you guys at google have access to could make a genius mind completely mad. And Matt is wasting his time with fortune cookies? LOL!
Matt – siliconZoo’s Cool! Thx for robots.txt advice.
S.E.W. Good advice but it’s … not …. working…. I’m going to start living as if it’s my THIRD chance!?
Speaking of pretty girls, any inside info on the Girls of Google?
sorry for the off topic comment
looking at Google analytics today i kept getting password login boxes for jgillick dot netripper dot com on my supposedly secure analytics pages.
Have you heard of this?
I cant find the website by typing in the url, do you guys have other methods to find out about or access a site like this.
I want to know what its doing there?
I will email the analytics team too, just thought that you and the experienced commenters on this site might be interested.
My favorite fortune cookie is taped to my monitor, “The dream is within you.”
Good morning Matt
Just wish to ask whether you have a list of Google DCs which you care to share with us. Or does that considered confidential matter in the plex
Have a great day.
Hey Matt,
You know you are truly a geek when you can do reverse IP resolution from memory
Matt,
[quote]Gary and Rahul #26: I’m looking into it. Lots of people have come back, and I’m asking someone to read the stillsupplemental emails from WMW[/quote]
Any progress here yet? We have not seen any changes at our end.
All updates greatly appreciated – I don’t think this ones going away until resolved.
What’d you do if you were told to ping 207.46.130.108?
Well, I must be geeky too considering I just tried that ip….. i will be over in the corner playing with a whiteboard.
I too felt the urge to ping that address. Still, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a geek – although I am. I would have loved to get a reply from it. It would have given meaning to the moment.
Of course, you might have done the same matt, and felt just as empty until you remembered the fortune cookie and the pretty girl. Am I right?
We are all geeks…
I got that same fortune cookie in high school and ended up dating the girl for about five months. Best pick-up line ever.
Lately, the best one I’ve gotten was: You will get a great deal on a major purchase.
I carry it around it my wallet.
Dear Matt, sorry for the OT, but Yahoo make some pishing: I search “classified” and I get this URL: classifieds.yahoo.com/ – 17k – 17 Mar 2006
But, this URL is not available, redirect to Yahoo.com (allways), only see by search engines cache.
That it’s a pishing from Yahoo?.
Best Regards,
ManWare.
This just in: Matt Cutts approves use of hidden text… More news to follow.
Sure he does! They are called Meta tags and comment text.
Hi Matt,
Did you follow what the fortune cookie told you to kiss the person next to you?
ewc21
Gary, I’m still talking about this issue with the crawl/indexing folks. I’m still working on it.
Good morning Matt
I see BigDaddy roll out very fast and there are only few non-BigDaddy DCs left . What should we expect to see after BigDaddy is deployed on all the DCs?
- PR/Back link update?
- Algos update?
- both?
- attempt to resolving canonical issues?
- attempt to resolving supplemental issues?
I wish you a great day and a successful week.
This has to be a setup or joke. I can’t see Matt approving a comment like this if it’s serious.
Adam, it must be a joke/setup. I’m all for easter eggs, but not for hidden text.
Harith, I can’t promise what we’ll do in the future, but things like a PR update seem doable after Bigdaddy is done. And all of the things you mentioned are things that I would like us to tackle down the road.
Hi Matt
Thanks a bunch for prompt feedback. Much appreciated.
And wish Google and the friends at the plex good luck and success with BigDaddy new infrastructure..
Have a great sunny day, Matt
>>>Matt Cutts Said,
March 19, 2006 @ 9:10 pm
Gary, I’m still talking about this issue with the crawl/indexing folks. I’m still working on it.
Matt Cutts Said,
March 19, 2006 @ 9:10 pm
Gary, I’m still talking about this issue with the crawl/indexing folks. I’m still working on it.
……………………………………
Matt,
THanks for the immediate feedback, I a very impressed with the improved communications lately.
Keep up the good work I hope you can get me and the community a full answer soon.
(must stop using arrow keys to highlight text as they cutt of the rest of the post as above!)
The girl in the top right hand corner should have won http://www.valleywag.com/tech/gg-pretourney.JPG
Where are all the geeks?? I was hoping someone would step up… but I guess not.
Matt, I’m ashamed: you should have known that 102.225.193.141 is in the IANA reserved address space. I wonder how many poor wannabes have tried to ping that IP because of your posting
. You should have chosen something more interesting like 12 7000000 1 . Hmm. Ping, ping. Who’s there? 
Thanks for mentioning the PR update thing Matt, it looks really strange from this end.
(I know everyone says that pr doesn’t matter, well I believe it does, it also doesn’t lie, cheat or throw babies out of buildings)
>>>I know everyone says that pr doesn’t matter
Only people who dont really know what they are talking about IMO. PR4 versus a PR5 might not matter much when so many other factors are present – but PR matters
Matt
With reference to your comments to young Harith of things you would like to tackle – I thought Canonicalizationszzis (sp?) issues were very much on the agenda ?
PR doesn’t matter… it’s just pretty.
I have a PR6 site that gets maybe 70 visitors/day and a PR 4 one that gets 4 visitors a day.
IT’s also easy to Fake
Is there an algorithmic way to teach people to block out on free throws:-)
Sorry about your Wildcats, but what a fun 4th quarter…and thanks again for keeping this blog.
My best fortune cookie:
“For a good cause, wrongdoing may be virtuous.”
I couldn’t make that up if I tried.
Looks like that Dark SEO trick is on the way out – next PR update I would have thought the PR10 would be a 0 along with the others which are changing over to PR0
and of course PR still means something but if others have come to different conclusions that is up to them.
Matt:
Are you SURE you were next to a pretty girl?
nice one
the one I have is “Never have sex with a stranger unless you are stranger than them.”
Matt,
#26 indeed. I’m of the opinion that #26 *should* be that you take all of the requests seriously, including reading & considering everything from Danny’s post to the IP on a fortune cookie! Right on.
However, many of us are really really stuck with this Supp. problem, and the User Support Team emails are getting demoralizing. Please stay at it with your crawl/indexing engineers! I’ve sent many emails to the SES Gmail address that have been met w/no response–should I assume they received it or keep going & keep writing?
A recent & really bad dogbite makes even this a painful post to type… almost as bad as having our homepage & hundreds of unique content pages thrown out of the index while scrapers grab our good content & run!
Thanks Matt…we haven’t done anything wrong here. Some responses to the SES Gmails would be awesome…
Hey Matt, help me finishing the sentence on this fortune cookie:
You have a website with 30k excluse content links that end in ?id=xxx, and I want to 301 them to links that end with something related to the content( for example id=201 is about a silver horses and i want it to become silverhorses/).
Will google go wild with so much 301s and penalize the crap out of you?
“man with hand in pocket feel cocky all day” Best fortune cookie EVAR!
I once had the self prophesizing message “You will find a small fortune.”
Matt – I’m at MIX06 here in Vegas and the fortune cookies all simply say “Microsoft IS Web 2.0″. Approx 2000 people here. Approx 0 Googlers here?!
If the future cookie said Yahoo, will you be moving from Google? Maybe it is written in the stars? lol
All fortune cookies come with the hidden text “between the sheets” at the end of the fortune.
Mac, I would finish that fortune cookie by saying that doing that many 301s shouldn’t hurt at all. But you may want to generate at what’s creating the backlinks. If it’s a catalog system with internal linkage, it might be easier to change the catalog. The reason is that those “&id=” urls might not get crawled, so we might not see the 301s in the first place.
Jonah, don’t get me started on basketball. UK and UNC both lost this weekend. And of course Duke is still in it. Sassinfrassin brickinbrackin..
Abhilash, I checked on one site that was in the supplemental situation and it had gotten ~240 regular pages back. It may take some of the sites a little while to be crawled again, but I’m trying to keep it foremost in the minds of the crawl folks.
Very insightful, JohnMu. That would be a good fortune for 11 days from now.
Now I must go to bed and ponder how to make comments here as useful+interesting as possible..
so did it get pinged,, i wanna know the outcome…
Matt Cutts Said,
March 21, 2006 @ 12:01 am
Now I must go to bed and ponder how to make comments here as useful+interesting as possible..
……………………………………………..
It would be useful if you could have direct link to “Matt Cutts Said” comments only by date order.
That way anybody waiting for a comment or wanting to re-find an old one could quickly scroll through your comments without the hundreds of others!
Now theres a challenge.
Hi Matt
With ref to the supplemental issue – do you think you have identified what has caused the issue ?
Hi Matt,
sorry for gettin out of topic. This is hitting my head – will duplicate content harm website rankings. what if i have more than 5 websites (some pages of same content). I understand there have been tons of discussion on this.
Thanks
Matt,
Although some people have got pages back in many still have not.
We are seing huge spider activity from the mozzilla bot at the moment but the pages are not being added to the index at all at this stage.
Should people in my situation be concerned ?
Cheers,
BB
I thought about the google bot when I read my cookie today: “someone will make your heart beat faster”
Use the search. I hear it’s a Google mod for the WordPress template.
It’s funny to see what the fortune cookie say sometimes. But hey folks, don’t required cookie, otherwise you may have a problem with Goog.
Matt, the security code should not be required on your blog. I don’t think any spammers would want to spam here, unless there are….
Wait until Search Engines Web opens his mouth. Then see if you feel the same way.
“How did it know I was standing by a pretty girl at the time? Nice.”
- Are you sure you were looking at the right direction?
Matt,
Looking at it at first, I though of a MAC address, rather than an IP. I guess I’ve been configuring too many wireless networks (where multiple, unamed access points need to have the MAC specified by the client).
I managed however, not to look up the manufacturer assigned to that block.
BTW The security code is hard for people with poor vision — what I thought was an ‘I’ was a ‘T’. I have a good monitor, just bad eyes.
Cheers,
Craig
Here are some evil fortunes that I have always loved….
“May the fleas of 1000 camels infect your armpits”
“That wasn’t chicken”
“I’m trapped in a fortune cookie company warehouse”
It could be close relative doing a prank on you. But the best prank was the one you did on everyone on april 1st, Darkseoteam! LOL