Foo.Bar with Google?

100 points by mragh 11y ago ↗ HN

I was Googling some Python topic when my search results page suddenly split in the middle with some text saying something to the effect of "You speak our language, would you like to take a test?", linking to http://www.google.com/foobar/ .

I followed it and was led to a pseudo-shell, where I then found some coding problems. I can return to the page to continue working on them.

I've searched around and haven't found anyone else talking about this. What is it?

21 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 47.8 ms ] thread

yzzxy 11y ago ↗

Recruiting

Rhapso 11y ago ↗

I got asked to interview for google due to python code on github, others I know have had similar invitations to interview as a result of python experience. They seem to be on a hiring push right now.

thearn4 11y ago ↗

Same here, though in my case it was LinkedIn.

anaktos 11y ago ↗

wow, i should publish my code on github more.

jp_sc 11y ago ↗

Do they ask you to remove the repo? I can't find any python code on your GitHub profile https://github.com/blamestross

Rhapso 11y ago ↗

this is the repo where most of my older academic stuff is. (blamestross is my personal account). It is a bit ironic because we do everything on university hosted private gitlab server now. https://github.com/BrendanBenshoof

wlrd 11y ago ↗

What were you searching?

kakakiki 11y ago ↗

Interesting. I tried logging into the site and it says "To login, you have to have logged in before. Confused? Search on..."

film42 11y ago ↗

Apparently this link will show up in your search results, but only when "it finds you" can you login and start the coding challenges.

akyu 11y ago ↗

Can you elaborate? I don't understand.

film42 11y ago ↗

> No puzzle here. You can only log in if Google has flagged your search topics.

> On google search, you have the variable window.location.search = "?gfe_rd=cr&ei=XXXGyZiVNHoFcuF8Qe7wYHACw&gws_rd=ssl"

> That string is appended to the url of the iframe: src="https://foobar.withgoogle.com/"+window.location.search

Check this sub-thread of the other thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8590155. Someone goes into more depth about it.

lun4r 11y ago ↗

There are quite a few matches for "google.com/foobar" … https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=%22google.com%2Ffoobar%...

Blahah 11y ago ↗

Those are mostly just using foobar as an example path in documentation.

samirmenon 11y ago ↗

What topic were you googling?

Also, its interesting that this account was created so recently... maybe this is Google itself.

mragh 11y ago ↗

I was searching stuff on Python lambdas.

No, not Google :) Just been lurking on HN for a while and never had anything interesting to add before.

iDemonix 11y ago ↗

Seems they're pushing to recruit Python engineers? I should really branch out from PHP and Perl...

dscrd 11y ago ↗

I apologize for going all reddit on you but: Duh.

joelthelion 11y ago ↗

People who haven't applied to Google yet: be warned that it's a long process that will take you a lot of time, and that the rejection rate is really high.

On the plus side: you will probably learn a lot.

owenwil 11y ago ↗

Can you share a screenshot?

[dead] hprof1 11y ago ↗

can you talk more bout it? ;_;

mtran1 11y ago ↗

I also got the code challenge from google. I was searching "angularjs directives"