A quirk in Google Egypt's search engine somehow propelled a local air conditioning company to collect 5.5 million followers, becoming the owner to become the most popular technician in Egypt on the Internet.
When doing a search for "Google" on Google Egypt in Arabic or English, "Technical Co. For Refrigeration and Air Conditioning" on Google Plus was the first result to be displayed, causing the company to rack up an unprecdented number of followers and customers.
The owner of the page, Amm Saber (or Uncle Saber), an air conditioning technician and the owner of a workshop downtown Cairo, was perplexed at how easily he became so popular. "I did nothing. I just created a page with my company's name through my account on Google. Then I started to receive a lot of phone calls," Touny told Al-Masry Al-Youm.
Although his page looks ordinary as it includes only a couple of personal photos for Saber al-Touny and business models in his worshop on Nageeb al-Rihany Street, he defeated specialists in SEO, or what is known as the Search Engines Engineering.
Google could not explain the quirk, besides that it was an error in the Search Engine Optimization system and has since been corrected. "It was a logarithmic error that has been addressed. The result is no longer the same," a Google official told Al-Masry Al-Youm.
Touny's page was created on May 4, 2015. It had 5,787,797 followers as of Wednesday June 3.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
