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.

Treasure Island is a former Navy base located in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. Terdiman couldn't get a look inside the structure, "which stands about four stories high and was made with a series of modern cargo containers." But after a lot of detective work, he concludes its most likely a floating data center. Google even patented the idea for one in 2009.

That's less exciting than the story itself, which includes plenty of photos and paragraphs like this:

When I met someone working in a section of Hangar 3 that's separate from the main part of the building and inquired what building it was, the man asked who I was looking for. I answered "Google," and without hesitating he said I needed to go to a main entrance a bit further down the side of the structure. That entrance was manned by a security guard and had two cameras mounted above the entryway. A security supervisor turned me away when I asked to visit Google or talk to Tim Brandon. Upon returning to Hangar 3 a couple of days later with a CNET photographer, we were watched closely by two people, including one with a big set of binoculars.

Knocking on the door of a secret data center is becoming its own journalism sub-genre.

[Image via Wikimedia]