Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

Recently, I decided to conduct a Google experiment and write down what the search engines suggests for the phrase "why are" followed by all kinds of nationalities, races, and localities (alright, "recently" seems to be last March, as evident from the Google theme, but I only decided to post this now).

I did this just for fun and found most of the results funny, some hilarious, and some offensive and controversial.

However, all of them have a reason for being there – statistics. It's what people search for. The cream of the crop. Stereotypes, hilarities, it's all here.

If you can, please don't take them too close to heart. In fact, if you're a righteous conservative thinking of lecturing me, …

Today Travis was messing around with a Chinese site blinkx has indexed a short while ago http://www.tudou.com and saw a cryptic error message that started coming up on all pages. The message looked something like this:

各位土豆：
为了给大家提供更好的服务，我们正在搬迁扩建土豆的中心机房。
3月14日凌晨0:00 ~ 夜间24:00，我们的服务暂停24小时。
3月15日凌晨0:00 新机房就搬迁完成了，土豆会准时回家。

Now, neither Travis nor I know the language of Chinese, so what do we do? Go to Google Translate, of course. Here's what Google Translate produced:

That's:

Members potatoes:
In order to provide you with better service, we are expanding the relocation of the central room of potatoes.
March 14 at 0:00 to 24:00 at night, our services will be suspended for 24 hours.
March 15 at 0:00 new room on the relocation is …