Culture

Google's Alphabet: Brought to you by...Hooli?

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are confirmed fans of HBO's "Silicon Valley." The Easter egg in their post renaming the company Alphabet suggests their fan status may go a step above the rest.

Joan E. Solsman Former Senior Reporter

Joan E. Solsman was CNET's senior media reporter, covering the intersection of entertainment and technology. She's reported from locations spanning from Disneyland to Serbian refugee camps, and she previously wrote for Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal. She bikes to get almost everywhere and has been doored only once.

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Joan E. Solsman

Aug. 10, 2015 3:44 p.m. PT

2 min read

"Silicon Valley" lampoons the tech industry in the San Francisco Bay Area. Google may have just returned the favor. HBO

Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin love "Silicon Valley" enough to wear T-shirts for Pied Piper and Hooli, the HBO comedy's rival companies.

Do they love it enough to name their own after it?

CEO Page -- in a blog post and on its new website abc.xyz -- said Monday that Google is restructuring itself under a new umbrella company called Alphabet, with a slimmed down version of Google itself operating in parallel with separate arms like smart-home unit Nest and high-speed-internet service Fiber.

What's in a name? Page said that first, he and Brin were attracted to it for representing a collection of letters underpinning language, "one of humanity's most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search!" Second, the pair liked the allusion to financial jargon "Alpha," which is an investment return above a benchmark.

But hidden inside the abc.xyz announcement was an Easter egg that hints at a third reason. Suffice to say, the fictional Hooli has a division under its umbrella called XYZ, which -- similar to Google X -- is a "moonshot factory." (Hat tip to Alex Weprin who appears to be one of the first to find the Easter egg.)

To find it:

1. Click the red "more" text to see Page's full post.
2. Find the sentence "Alphabet will also include our X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, our drone delivery effort."
3. Click on the period at the end of the sentence.

"Silicon Valley" creator Mike Judge has said his show is more fact that fiction. Put Alphabet in the column of life imitating art.