“Google is unsurprisingly reluctant to comment on the record about Santa’s existence or the company’s complicated relationship with him, other than to say that, as one company spokesperson states, “Santa’s Google engineers are eager to spread holiday cheer around the globe.” But as one former engineering manager and “lead elf” at Google (yes, that’s what they call themselves), Bruno Bowden, tells OZY, like many things at Google, the Santa tracker started as a “bit of fun” and then took on a life of its own. And, although Google promotes the tracker on its home page, it has not attempted to modify its fairly sacrosanct search results to thwart inquiring minds. With such a modification, it becomes “technically and morally and legally … a lot more complicated to figure out what’s the right answer. So we just provided something fun,” says Bowden, now an equity partner at Data Collective Venture Capital.”
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