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Outbyte Driver Updater FREEFix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesFind Drivers →Outbyte PC Repair FREERepair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Yes. On August 10, 2015, Google’s public web announcement introducing Alphabet contained a concealed hyperlink to hooli.xyz, the fictional technology company from HBO’s Silicon Valley. The link appeared at the end of the sentence about Google X, Wing and drone delivery—not as a visible “Hooli” label.
What Google announced on August 10, 2015
In a letter authored by then-Google CEO Larry Page, Google announced Alphabet as a new parent company. Page would become Alphabet’s CEO, Sergey Brin its president, and Google would operate as a wholly owned Alphabet subsidiary. The stated goal was to keep Google focused while placing experimental or less-related businesses under a broader corporate structure.
The announcement remains available in current form at abc.xyz, while Google’s August 2015 blog archive identifies the original date and author at Google’s Official Blog.
Where the hidden link was placed
The Easter egg was embedded in the web version of the announcement. To locate the relevant passage in the original page:
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- Open the Alphabet announcement.
- Find the paragraph explaining that Page and Brin were “seriously in the business of starting new things.”
- Look for the sentence: “Alphabet will also include our X lab, which incubates new efforts like Wing, our drone delivery effort.”
- Inspect the sentence’s ending area, especially the final period and nearby words.
Contemporary reports differ on whether the clickable target was only the period, the final words, or a nearby text span. The defensible description is that the hyperlink was attached to the end of the Wing sentence. Reports from Phandroid, TIME and ITmedia documented the discovery.
What the link led to
The destination was hooli.xyz, a promotional website for Hooli, the fictional technology giant at the center of Silicon Valley. The site presented Hooli’s experimental operation with exaggerated language about moonshots, laboratories and ambitious possibilities.
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- Watch live TV and access over 800 free channels from Pluto TV, Tubi, and more[3]; if you find an interesting show or movie on your TV, mobile app, or Google search, you can easily add it to your watchlist, so it’s ready when you are[2]
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Hooli is not a literal portrayal of Google. The show’s company is a fictional, deliberately enlarged composite of Silicon Valley corporations and their habits, with founder Gavin Belson embodying grandiose mission statements, aggressive competition and corporate absurdity. Contemporary cultural coverage explains that broader satire at The Guardian.
Why the joke fit Alphabet’s structure
The reference worked because the surrounding announcement used language that closely echoed Hooli’s fictional branding. Google X was described as an incubator for speculative projects such as Wing, while Alphabet was designed as an umbrella for Google and other ambitious ventures. Hooli.xyz similarly framed Hooli as an experimental “moonshot” division.
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That makes the hyperlink a compact piece of self-aware corporate humor: Google was announcing a structure built to accommodate bold, uncertain projects while quietly pointing readers toward television’s parody of precisely that kind of Silicon Valley ambition. The sources establish the link and the thematic parallel, but they do not identify who inserted it or prove that Google and HBO coordinated the placement.
It was not in every official version
The Easter egg belonged to the public web announcement, often called a press release in contemporary headlines. Reporting indicated that the investor-facing version of the release omitted the Hooli hyperlink. That distinction matters: it was a feature of one online presentation of Page’s announcement, not necessarily every distributed copy.
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| Version | What can be established |
|---|---|
| Public web announcement | Contained the hidden link at the end of the X lab/Wing sentence, according to contemporary reports. |
| Investor-facing release | Reportedly did not contain the link. |
| Current Alphabet page | Preserves the announcement text, but the visible page at abc.xyz does not expose the original Hooli hyperlink. |
Can you still use the Easter egg today?
The historical event is well documented: the link was real in 2015, and multiple contemporaneous accounts recorded its Hooli.xyz destination. The current Alphabet page no longer visibly reproduces the original link, and the present operation of Hooli.xyz has not been reliably established here.
A modern browser may therefore show a redesigned page, no hyperlink, different behavior on mobile, or a destination that has changed or disappeared. Treat the URL as a historical promotional site rather than a guaranteed live Easter egg. An archived capture or a contemporaneous report is the most reliable way to verify how the original page behaved.
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Why the 2015 Easter egg still matters
This was more than a random television reference. Google was presenting Alphabet as a collection of ambitious technology efforts, and the hidden Hooli link mirrored that message through the show’s satire. Its placement also rewarded readers who inspected the announcement closely, turning a formal restructuring letter into a small piece of Silicon Valley in-joke culture.
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