05 March 2006

Google Googlied by Spaiku Adages

Today was a black day in the annals of my Gmail account: I received my first piece of spam. You might think I should be rejoicing that I've only ever received one piece of spam, but bear in mind that this is a relatively new account, and one that I've not used much. Moreover, Gmail comes with spam filtering as standard: you might hope that Google's vast computing engines would be able consistently to spot spam.

So far they have: the spam bucket of my account lists some 42 spam messages that Google caught. The question is: why did Google get googlied by this one? It's not particularly cunning: it has the usual obfuscated product names (it's one of those), with some random characters and the usual poetic signoff.

Actually, now that I come to check, this turns out to be slightly special:

Work first and then rest.
Actions speak louder than words.
Old head and young hand.

Maybe this is Gmail's Achille's Heel: it is defenceless in the face of spam haiku (spaiku?) adages.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

And the winner of the best blog post title is ... "Google Googlied by Spaiku Adages," by Glyn Moody.

...
In light of your Wikipedia post last week I especially like the fact that Googly is listed among the hardest words to translate.

May the academy awards take notice ...

Glyn Moody said...

...but maybe I tried a little too hard?