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624652 and Google

Kalle Zetterlund [PersonRank 1]

Tuesday, October 11, 2005
18 years ago

The number 624652 has a connection to Google. Can you find it?

Finding other interesting properties of the number of course gives extra cred.

Jim D [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

Thoughts:

Phone keypad spellings?

Longitude/Latitude?

IP Address?

Timestamp?

Leet speak?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Jim, yeah, could be :)

CJ M [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

I'm stumped, but not giving up. :-)

Perhaps an help... [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

I don't know if I'm far or not, but 62465 = 2*2*7*7*3187 (3187 cannot be divided)...

I'm still searching...

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

> 2*2*7*7*3187

Interesting, but not the answer...

TheMatt [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

OK, if you add a hyphen, you get 624-652. These are the pages of the article Eugene Wigner wrote in Z. Physik in 1927 that laid the foundations of the Wigner-Eckart Theorem. Wigner died on January 1, 1995. January 1 is also the day that ARPANET switched to IP and the day when DNS was turned on. Google uses IP and DNS.

Justin Pfister [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Google – 6 letters
62465 – 6 numbers

Google -
2-G's, 2-O's, 1-L, 1-E

624652
2-6's, 2-2's, 1-4, 1-5

624652 could be some sort of encrypted "Google" which also might be the seed for some other cryptic things.

Tony Savo [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

624652 minutes = 433.871 days which is 70 some days more than a full year, which is approx when Google began trading as a public company. Could it be the minutes of Google as a publically traded company?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

TheMatt, very interesting connection... not the one we're looking for.

Let me just say that if you find the answer, you can describe it in one sentence, and it will be instantly clear.
Also, one of you is going towards a good direction already.

Tony Ruscoe [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I was thinking it could be something to do with colors.

#624652 – the hex for a shade of purple

Or, where each number represents a letter in the alphabet (i.e. 1=a, 2=b, 3=c, etc.):

#fbdfeb – the hex for a shade of pink

Can't see any link to Google there!

Erick [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Goodle's founder's high-school locker combination?

62-46-52....haha

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Not yet. Someone had an interesting piece in his comment...

Justin Pfister [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Google (2-G's, 2-O's, 1-l, 1-E)
624652 (2-6's, 2-2's, 1-4, 1-5)

e -
2.71828 (2-2's,2-8's, 1-7, 1-1)
.718281 (2-8's,2-1's, 1-2, 1-7)

There's a patter of having 2 pairs of 2 and 2 individuals

Jim D [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

That's the combination on my luggage!
</spaceballs>

The number as stated could be decimal, hex or even octal. It's too small to be an IP address. At least here it doesn't spell out anything meaningful on my mobile with or without predictive text (unless magmja/mainla means anything? Hmm... gmamja? Is that Google's next product? :)). Too large for a street address. Is it the number Google texts you from to set up your GMail account? Google's incorporation number? The number of Google shareholders?

Jim D [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

The number of servers in Google's farm? The number of requests served in a minute? The lines of code written for the Summer of Code? The number of books indexed by Google? The number of guesses it will take to guess the answer to this question?

Stéphane [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

> Not yet. Someone had an interesting piece in his comment...

But who ?

Tony seem to have a very complex answer, too complex to be described with one sentence,
TheMatt searched too hard ,
did Justin's letter-play going the right way ?,
didn't I go wrong with my "2*2*7*7*3187" ?

I won't be able to sleep right away!

Basil [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Ok I think I've got it.

Number is 624652

6 = looks like a G
2*4 = 8, which on its side looks like oo
6 = looks like G
5*2 = 10, which looks like le

Hence 624652 = 68610 = G8G10 = GOOGLe = GOOGLE

Is that it?

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Jim: as a hint, I don't think a Google employee (like one of their sysops) would know the answer to the riddle right away, even when he would know about Google's server farms, number of books indexed, and so on.

Stéphane: Yes, it was Tony who had the "interesting piece". But to say he was close to the answer could be very misleading...

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Basil: Good one – you guys are creative. But that's not the solution.

Stephane [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

Basil, what hell do you have smoked to find this! LOL

Congratulations, in case that's it :-)

Basil [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Hmm ok... come on guys, we'll figure it out yet!

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Hmm, now that I think of it, some sysops actually might know the answer...

Basil [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Stephane: haha I am smoking nothing! But that was a bit far out come to think of it.

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Another hint: when I said earlier that someone's going towards a good direction already, I was referring to Justin Pfister's first comment.

Stéphane [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

Hmmm.... I just noticed that, as Tony said, 624652 has digits <= 6, and 6 digits...

By converting in hexa, that could be #fbdfeb
decimal : 16506859
binary : 111110111101111111101011
octal : 76757753

Nothing to seem to deal with google, or a googol (http://www.google.com/search?hl=fr&c2coff=1&q=googol&btnG=Rechercher&lr=lang_fr)...

Any idea of an interesting conversion type ?

Justin Pfister [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Great! – I'm still stuck like a leaf in the mud .. Six, Two, four, six, five, two .. what in the Googleverse are we going to have to do?

Basil [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Holy crap people, I'm tired. I can't wait to get up tomorrow and find the answer at the bottom of this thread, don't let me down! ;-)

TheMatt [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

I'll go the wild route: 624652 is the number of searches on Google per minute. That would be 37,479,120 per hour or 899,498,880 per day. That kinda scares me, actually, I'm not sure if Google's hardware can handle that.

Or, even scarier, it's the number of searches per *second*. If that's true, you're at 53,969,932,800 a day. That seems a bit high, but if you count every Google search in every language...?

TheMatt [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

Aw nuts, Jim D already thought of it. Well...uh...I did the really stupid math to extrapolate it out.

TheMatt [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

Oh, it's obvious. Take GOOGLE. Now, start with the first G on a Triple Word Score, and then the L is on a double letter score. That is 2+1+1+2+2+1=9*3=27 which is just two less than 6+2+4+6+5+2=25. Those two are for...uh...a sacrifice to the servers to keep them running.

Justin Pfister [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

I assume the answer to this riddle is clear and relatively simple. I doubt it's going to have to do with searches per minute or anything that is pretty much an estimate..

It probably has to do with something google does best and that's searching and searching ultimately deals with patterns. I came up with my first guess thinking Google and 624652 were simular because they shared the same pattern.

Ultimately, there is no different between letters and numbers except that we percieve them differently. A 6 is, as Basil said, an upside down G, but it's also a 6. 6 also sounds like "Sex". "Live" backwards is "Evil".. The patterns are everywhere!

As language evolves, what's stopping us from looking at the numbers 567 and thinking "DOG"? What's stopping us from looking at 624652 and thinking "Google"?.

I'm very excited to discover the answer to this Googlrific riddle.

George R [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Compare the digits to the colors of the letters in Google's logo.

G blue 6
o red 2
o yellow 4
g blue 6
l green 5
e red 2

JDG [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

Starting with violet and working with George R's comment you get the mapping to the rainbow:
violet=1
red=2
orange=3
yellow=4
green=5
blue=6
indigo=7

then the number 624652 is just a mapping to the colors of the Google logo.

George R [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

These are resistance color codes.

Kalle Zetterlund [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

You got it!

Good work.

For a complete table of the colour mappings, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_color_code

Justin Pfister [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Wow.. that was fun. I wish I stuck with it a little longer.. Colors.. That makes so much sense now why the pattern was simular.

Kalle Zetterlund [PersonRank 1]

18 years ago #

Yes, you were quite close.

The reason i brought this up was actually the opposite; Is there any logic in the coloring of the letters in the Google logo? Being a company named after a number, i though maybe there was some hidden number or message here – hence the addendum "Finding other interesting properties of the number of course gives extra cred."

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Congrats George R!

g blue o red o yellow g blue l green e red [PersonRank 0]

18 years ago #

g blue o red o yellow g blue l green e red
g o o g l e
google google google google google google

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