April Fools Google

Google Does Have a Sense of Humor!

Google Changes it Name

Google in the spirit of April Fools Day changed it name to Topeka.  Read Google’s Press Release here.

“Early last month the mayor of Topeka, Kansas stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honor that moving gesture. Today we are pleased to announce that as of 1AM (Central Daylight Time) April 1st, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka.”

Google Romance Released

Google also released  Google Romance, which let’s you “pin all your romantic hopes on Google.”  See it here http://www.google.com/romance/.

“When you think about it, love is just another search problem. And we’ve thought about it. A lot. Google Romance™ is our solution.”

Where Am I?

Google also announced a new mobile search dubbed “Where am I”.  Try getting on your mobile phone and search “Where am I”.  Google told me I was on a Chess Board at position “E4”.  Read Google’s Press Release here.

So let us know where you are.  I wonder how many different places Google can send us to.

Some other subtle pranks I found:

Search Results

Try running a search on Topeka (ie google.com).  This is what I got.

Results 1 – 10 of about 361,000,000 for real estate [definition]. (0.03 femtogalactic years)

Some other results you might find are; or example microfortnights, microweeks, nanocenturies, epochs, femtogalactic years, parsecs, 23.00 skidoo, jiffies, shakes of a lamb’s tail, gigawatts, hertz, Planck times, centibeats, centons, and warp factors.

YouTube

The logo of YouTube was changed to an ASCII-style one made out of 1s.

They also announced TEXTp video quality.  You’ve heard of HD formats like 720p and 1080p. Today they are offering a new way to experience YouTube: text-only mode or TEXTp. Try it out by clicking on some of the videos on the home page.  You can read more at: http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/

Google Voice

Google placed a New! Standard Voicemail Mode link in the Google Voice main page.

Gmail vowels

The home page of GMail (English version), including its logo, has been disemvowelled which means all the vowels have been removed.

Chrome Sounds

Google created a new extension, Chrome Sounds.  Taking an earful of inspiration from the HTML5 audio tag, we’ve spent the past few months deep in psychoacoustic models, the Whittaker-Nyquist-Kotelnikov-Shannon sampling theorem, Franssen effects, Shepard-Risset Tones, and 11.1 surround sound research to build a cutting-edge audio-driven user interface for our users, available through a new Chrome extension. With this extension, Chrome will provide audio feedback as you browse to web pages and interact with the browser.

Picasa

New! Tired of boring 4×6 photos? LifeSize^TM them.

Miniature portraits in gaudy gold frames are out. Stand-up, life-size cardboard cut-outs are in. Make yours today here.

Have fun with these search results:

• Searching for “the loneliest number” will make the calculator answer 1.
• Searching for “the answer to life, the universe, and everything” will make the Calculator answer 42, a reference to Douglas Adams’s novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In order for this to be successful the phrase must be entered in lowercase and without the quotation marks. The same reference is made when speaking to an artificial intelligence called meliza next to “the face on Mars” in Google Earth. When the number 42 is typed, the AI produces the output “42 is the answer to the ultimate question about life, the universe, and everything.”
• Searching for “the number of horns on a unicorn” produces the answer “1” in the Calculator. (Google actually reads the strings “number of horns on a unicorn” and “answer to life the universe and everything” as numbers. One can also use these phrases in the calculator. For example searching for “number of horns on a unicorn usd in euro” produces the current dollar / euro course or searching for “answer to life the universe and everything*5” produces 210.)
• Searching for “once in a blue moon” shows the result “1.16699016 × 10^-8 hertz”. This corresponds to about two years, eight months.
• Searching for “recursion” shows “Did you mean: recursion“.
• Searching for “anagram” shows “Did you mean: nag a ram“.
• Google offers services in many languages, including several uncommon ones like Swedish Chef‘s Bork bork bork, Pig Latin, Hacker (usually known as leetspeak), Elmer Fudd, Klingon and Pirate
• The measurement tool in Google Earth allows users to measure distance in smoots, a unit of length derived from a tradition at MIT.
• If one sets the iGoogle theme to the “Beach” option, then at 3:14 AM every morning, the Loch Ness Monster surfaces for 1 minute, then at 3:15 dives back under. The reason for the timing of 3:14 is rumored to be a tribute to the number pi.
• On Google Earth, tapping out ctrl-alt-A will activate a hidden flight simulator. (This is now an official feature.)
• Going on Google Street View, and heading to the rear of the company’s Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View, California, the Google Street View’s production team can be seen.
• In Chrome, Google’s Web Browser, entering “about:internets” into the address bar brings up a copy of the Windows Screen Saver 3D Pipes, with the title “Don’t Clog the Tubes”. In the event that this does not occur due to the fact that the screensaver file does not exist in the system, the browser will instead display a gray screen with the title “The Tubes are Clogged!” This has been removed as of the 2.0.169.1 release.
• Entering the term “table” into Google Translate for Spanish to English will return “Is there a striptease bar in the town?” as a definition.
• Searching “ascii art” will turn the Google logo into ASCII art. Mysteriously, Searching “ASCII art” returns a normal search page, even though ASCII is the correct spelling.

So it is nice to see that Google has a sense of humor.  So what pranks did you pull today?