[coldtea]

>So first of all this is not "a secret" at all and you don't need to be "special" to do it. And of course you don't get targeted personally but they do an automated/anonymous match on your search history.

Yeah, and there were no magical unicorns involved, what a dissapointment.

That said, I think all these premises are wrong.

Clearly this was indeed a secret. It wasn't publicly announced to be happening, only appeared to selected individuals.

Second, you do need to be special. Special doesn't mean to have some mutated X gene, just that it doesn't apply to everybody, but only those matching specific criteria. In this case you have to have the skills to be able to trigger the process (with matching query results) and then complete the puzzles. That would leave 99.99 of the population out.

As for the fact that "you don't get targeted personally but they do an automated/anonymous match on your search history", in the end you do get targeted personally (if you succeed), and obviously even people who get targeted personally "from the start" are first targeted by automated matches between tons of candidates. I don't think some recruiter just pops up a name out of the blue because they personally know them.

[burgerdev]

> Clearly this was indeed a secret.

This is from January: http://jacquerie.github.io/google-foobar-post-mortem/