Perhaps you've heard of Google's puzzling four-story tall barge floating in the San Francisco Bay? Maybe you caught wind of Google's similarly clandestine barge bouying along in Portland Harbor? Well, that's not the way Google wanted it to happen.

CNET's Daniel Terdiman has spun a spooky Nancy Drew adventure about trying to uncover the origins of a "big and mysterious" thing "rising from a floating barge at the end of Treasure Island" that has "Google's fingerprints" all over it.