Special Circumstances

Famous researchers and "Work at google" ads

Not so long ago, if you searched for "machine learning" or "computational linguistics" in google, you would get an ad (so-called Sponsored Link) from google: the "Work at google" ad.

Not so well known was that due to the inherent (or explicit) clustering over queries, you would also get this ad if you searched for a particular name. The names were usually of famous computational linguists or machine learning people. For example, if you searched for fernando pereira you would get an ad asking whether you would like to "Work at google". Unfortunately, Fernando's name no longer triggers the ad.

But some other names still do. The following is only a partial list of names that trigger "Work at google" ads:

Work at google Ads

• dekai wu
• andrew mccallum
• yaov freund
• daniel marcu
• vladimir vapnik
• soumen chakrabarti
• david yarowsky

A small variation is a more specific ad which targets NLP searchers:

Work on NLP at google (with the blurb "google is hiring experts in statistical natural language processing")

• aravind joshi
• fred jelinek
• robert schapire
• dan jurafsky
• steven abney
• stuart shieber

What is equally suprising is that other names that you might think of as being in this class do not trigger the same ad. So what is the key that distinguishes these people from other, arguably just-as-famous researchers?