I think it's a new/old marketing strategy. Make it interesting enough that people see and notice it but don't understand what it is, with the hopes that you go out to figure out what it is. A brave strategy, but since it's still around, I guess it works sometimes.

It incentivises people to ask each other about it. But you need high pervasiveness of the ad for two people to both have seen it and ask each other about it.

I still didn’t know what it was. Went to the headline link and had no idea, typed in “what is this”. Still no idea. I had to read the hn comments to discover it is a search proxy..