A Secret Message from Google Brazil

Tuesday, 5th October 2010 by

Standing outside their offices in Belo Horizonte, we find the Google Team,
officially welcoming Street View to Brazil. We've recently heard rumors that, as with so many of Google's products, one of the engineers has a hidden message....

Perhaps it's this man, who's called Cabrito (or so his sign says). We presume he works for Google, but can't find him on LinkedIn. Is there a hidden message in the sign?

This is Kermit the Frog, we're pretty sure he doesn't work for Google. Why is he there? Is it another secret message?

Or is it these two guys, standing away from the main group? The image held by the man on the left is a QR code, a 2D barcode format that was originally made popular in Japan for printed weblinks, and is now used on Google's Favourite Places program. It must contain a secret message!

You can get apps for most mobile phones that will read the QR code and automatically direct you to the link contained. Sadly, due to the uneven paper on our Googler's sign, we are unable to read the QR code from the street view image.

However, using sophisticated image reconstruction techniques1, we can exclusively reveal the original QR code, and the secret message contained within, which is…

"Google Geo Engineering"

Oh.

Is that it?


  1. "sophisticated" in so far as I redrew the QR code pixel-by-pixel. ↩︎