Fans of HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’ might see a little more than some recaps and reviews today when they Google search the show. If you haven’t seen the season 3 premiere episode last night, you might want to skip the following paragraph for minor spoilers.
In its search results, you’ll see featured Google Post stories about Stanford Robotics’ road hit, Jack Barker, or Hooli stocks rising. You’ll recognize these as news that happened in the fictional Silicon Valley, during which Pied Piper’s Richard Hendricks was “demoted” from his title as CEO, promptly drove into an Alpha Dog-like robot, and Hooli gained some stocks after firing employees from its failed Nucleus project.
With these fictional news as part of the search results, the lines between that’s real and fake become even blurrier. After all, Google announced its own version of a Pied Piper-esque compression algorithm just last fall. Is art imitating life, or vice versa?
Whatever the case, it’s clear that Google is a fan of the show – when Google Inc. reorganized as Alphabet last year, it added a hidden link to Hooli XYZ’s homepage, a nod to Google’s own moonshot division.
Since Google Posts are handled from the partner’s end, it seems HBO may update these news stories with every new episode of ‘Silicon Valley,’ so if you’re a big fan of the show, this is gonna be a fun season to follow up with in real life.
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