• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, May 6, 2010

Remember when Google was a proud member of the too-big-to-advertise club? Not so anymore. Last year's Super Bowl ad buy demonstrated that even the mighty search engine de tutti search engines is merely mortal after all. The company seems to be working against its own dweeby mythology and by trying to affect a more human appeal in its ads. But in a new set of viral video promotions for the Google Chrome browser, the kids in the lab are back in action ... and back in the lab. To coincide with a new beta release of the browser, which is gaining market share, Google sent into the wild a fun and wacky set of field tests of Chrome's speed. Can it beat a potato or a banana shot from a cannon? How does it hold up against lightning? The Google video shows super-slow motion of these and other actions beside Chrome loading a Web page.

The resulting videos were shot at 2700 frames per second at 1920 x 1080. See, you knew that math was going to be involved at some point. At the YouTube page hosting this video the engineers and crew lay out what went into the project and even provide a FAQ that anticipates all of the "wait but..." kinds of questions that their fellow science club fans would tend to ask. Well, actually, the creators of the project are clever enough marketers to craft the questions as touts of the browser technology and the new features. Hey, why doesn't text appear first on screen and then the images? Glad you asked, Norman. It is that special video buffering we do to make pages appear in a single flash.

Of course there is the inevitable "making of..." video to accompany the Google promo. This is the new one-two move that is an incredibly cagy way to grow your viral video some legs. Give audiences some jaw dropping effects in the first release and then send out a behind-the-scenes follow-up that shows how it is done. The "Making of" video has gotten nearly 148,000 views.

It is good to know that the kids in the lab are doing something productive with the billions of dollars we pay them each year.