Brothers & Sisters Hacks Google to Create Cryptic Burger Treasure Hunt for London Restaurants

London-based burger chain BEER + BURGER is celebrating National Dictionary Day with a fiendishly cryptic word-based digital treasure hunt entitled ‘The Great Burger Hunt’. The online campaign, devised by Brothers & Sisters, will see burger aficionados take to Google for a chance to win a year’s supply of burgers.

In order to create the competition for BEER + BURGER, Brothers & Sisters worked closely with tech company Visual Voice to look at ways in which they could make the competition mind-bogglingly difficult to solve but incredibly easy to access. Inspired by the elusive Googlewhack (an online contest to find a Google search - consisting of exactly two words - that returns only one hit) the team sought to devise a way to make Google host their treasure hunt for free.

Andy Fowler, founder of Brothers & Sisters comments: “We had come across the concept of a ‘Googlewhack’ some time ago and have been trying our hand at finding the rare terms ever since. In today’s data-saturated world it seems crazy that there can still be combinations of words that bring up only one result on Google. We thought it would be fun to hijack their search engine and plant some Easter eggs of our own – a year’s supply of burger shaped ones.”

The campaign, which launches today, lasts for 10 days and will see daily clues shared on BEER + BURGER’s Instagram and Twitter accounts. Foodies, word geeks – or just people that love winning – can check out the posts online each day to try and decipher the word being described by each clue. If they think they’ve figured it out, they can search ‘Beer + whatever they think the answer is’ on Google, remembering to use quote marks. 

Those who guess the winning word combination and search it through Google can then find a hidden website on the results page. The first person to find the page and submit their email address will be the day’s winner. 

Speaking of how the team managed to find Google search combinations that didn’t already exist, Andy notes: “We spent a huge amount of time in the dictionary looking for words that don’t have regular use. It’s for World Dictionary Day ultimately so we wanted to create something that makes people find new words that frankly none of us use regularly - apart from people on Countdown and perhaps World Scrabble Champion, Nigel Richards!”