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Comment by perth | Hacker News Reader

Google hijacked my search result with that fine recruiting method at work a few weeks ago. I checked it out with a burner Google account and it seems like it was a recruiting method where they have you solve programming questions on that service[1]. I did a few of the "levels" and they're all just tricky programming questions. However..

Even not signed into an account, which, I don't sign in to any Google services at work in interest of protecting IP, Google was able to track enough via cookies / me being on an si corp network to throw that to me.

[1] Pic I took on my phone: https://i.imgur.com/7X7ybUv.jpeg

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Foobar is well-known and sometimes super easy to guess. For a few years before 2019, you could get it by simply searching “python list comprehension”. It’s just a way to find people searching certain stuff and encourage them to work at Google. Having an automated system pre-screening people in this way vastly improves the quality of applicants that come in.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17289580

Ok well this ycombinator post you linked confirmed my suspicions that the challenge is targeted based on location/network address.

> "ISTR that only works from the USA."

Nope. I've had foobar from outside the US.

It has nothing to do with you being on a corp network. I've gotten that on my personal computer

Then how do they choose who to flip the switch on for it? Purely fingerprinting of searches completely at random with no direction?

I don't know how it's decided but yeah pretty sure it's just based on searches and randomness. Someone searching for programming terms related to openings and willing to answer the questions is likely to be a good candidate

I'm still skeptical that location/network address doesn't have a "weight" in the equation; but yeah it could be un-related you make a good point.

Google has done that for about a decade.

And.. does doing something questionable for a long time make it good? Shouldn't abusing their dominance in the search engine marketplace to poach employees be a pretty big anti-trust thing?

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