OK, Google: throw some shade

Google never made a serious effort to buy Twitter, and perhaps we now know why. In most cases, a query for “what do you call a company that was meant to fail” returns Twitter as its first result, as Matt Laroche pointed out today. If you’re logged in to Google and have enabled personalized results, Twitter may slide down the page. But Twitter is the top result for a logged-out user, at least as of this morning.

So what gives? One thought is that Twitter’s close association with the Fail Whale, mentioned four times in its Wikipedia entry, tied the company to failure in Google’s mind. Another is that Google’s famed Knowledge Graph has quietly developed dynamic predictive models of all world events, and is now indistinguishable from prophecy. But the best thinking here is simply that Google be shady. Shade on, you shady shade box.