What does one Google? Your suggestions

The bright young things at Google no doubt thought that they had got everything covered when the Queen visited their London HQ yesterday. The exciting new products were all up and running, and the staff had all rehearsed their presentations until they were word-perfect.

There was only one thing that they had not reckoned with: the Duke of Edinburgh. He may be 87, an age when most men leave the latest advances in gadgetry to their grand-children, but Prince Philip has long been known for his interest in technology, and as he was shown round the offices in Victoria he was bristling with pertinent questions.

After a demonstration of Google Earth, which included showing satellite pictures of Buckingham Palace, the Duke asked the Google team if they could get up an image of their own office. It seemed a simple enough request. “Do you know where it is?” he asked, a trifle unnecessarily.

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• What does one Google? Your suggestions

A couple of clicks on a mouse, and moments later the image on the computer screen had moved the few hundred yards from the Palace to Belgrave House, 76 Buckingham Palace Road, Google’s London home. And there . . . was no Google.

The street was there. The surrounding buildings were there. As for the company HQ, all the screen could show was an empty site, because the picture had been taken before the office block was built.

“It is just that the picture came from a time when it was a piece of land,” said Nikesh Arora, Google’s president for Europe, Middle East and Africa, resolutely refusing to be embarrassed by such an obvious failure of planning.

Still, at least there was the laughing baby. Google bought YouTube two years ago, and the tour included a screening of one of the video-sharing website’s most popular clips, a film of a baby laughing uproariously in his high chair.

The Queen was most definitely amused. “Lovely little thing, isn’t it?” she said to Philip. “Amazing a child would laugh like that.”

No slouch at computers herself – she exchanges e-mails with her grand-children and has her own channel on YouTube – the Queen had a chance to show off her mouse-moving skills when she was invited to upload on to YouTube a film of the 1968 reception at Buckingham Palace for returning Olympians.

Despite peering slightly quizzically at the screen, being called upon to click on the upload icon did not seem to cause the 82-year-old monarch any problems, although she must be one of the few people in the world to operate a computer in long black gloves.

Afterwards there was a round of applause from the assembled Goog-lers, most of whom probably do not meet many people over 80 who operate a computer.

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