"Whale fail" - What does this mean?
Google uses the phrase "Whale fail" on this picture (from their error page):
What does it mean?
Solution 1:
It's a reference to the Twitter "fail whale", integrating a Google-Books-appropriate collateral reference to Moby Dick. (It appears that Captain Ahab is dejected because the whale in front of him is green, not white; his search for the white whale has suffered a case of "whale fail".) This is all related to the fairly recent, Internet-driven nouning of the verb "fail".
It doesn't actually mean anything other than that your Web request failed.