Philip query turns Google red

By OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT

London

Oct. 17: Queen Eli-zabeth II’s husband Pri-nce Philip, who is well-known for his gaffes, left executives at London office of Internet search engine Google red-faced during a visit on Thursday.

This time it was not a slip up by the 87-year-old Duke of Edinburgh. He just caught the Google UK staff unprepared. After a demonstration of Google Earth, which included showing satellite pictures of Buckingham Palace, Prince Philip asked the Google team if they could get up an image of their own office, the Times reported. He asked: "Do you know where it is?"

However, the executives at the Internet search engine’s London office were left squirming in embarrassment as Google’s London office at 76 Buckingham Palace Road was not there on Google Earth. 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.

Refusing to be fazed, Mr Nikesh Arora, Google’s president for Europe, West Asia and Africa, was quoted as saying: "It is just that the picture came from a time when it was a piece of land." The visit to Google’s London offices by Queen Elizabeth II and her husband was highlighted with an image of the queen is being used in the homepage logo of Google UK on Thursday. The queen was amused by a YouTube clip of a baby laughing uproariously in his high chair .

which was shown to her as part of the presentation.