Sophistication
Does anyone remember the days when it was considered revolutionary to think that one day you’d be able to connect CGI-based applications to a database? I only recollect this through friends who were old enough at the time to comprehend such a thing; I was still a little hooligan back then with dreams of being a rock star, not a Product Manager, VP, or CEO.
I know it’s a tad cliche to blog on things that are taken for granted nowadays, but I just ran into something while changing my Google AdWord config for this site. I have been doing a little cost-effective experiment since 2005-08-21, and so far it’s paid off. But check this out:
Fans of the movie Van Wilder will recognize this line immediatlely. People who haven’t seen the movie won’t, but it gives them a good excuse to check out a great American classic.
I was trying to combine my display URL with the last line of the ad to see if I could cicumvent Google’s 35-character line limit. I did so by putting a semi-colon after "…Barry White". As shown in the image, the app caught the attempted trick and barfed out an error. Cool. Second, I figured since the Display URL was only for show, I could tack regular English in there — nope, second barf. Even cooler.
This is a great example of the Product Manager, or whomever design this feature, doing their job and it’s inspiring. While I could imagine a ton of people have tried to do this, leading Google to put catches in place for it, I doubt it was something that was in the initial version of the service. Nevertheless, it’s a great lesson for first-time / early product builders — the devil (or God) is in the details.
Again, nice work Google.
