I was going about my business fully aware that this was one of the days where we can't trust much of anything. As I searched around I realized something odd was happening in the 'returned in' porrtion at the top of the SERP. Funny fella's over there...
Lol... ok, Star Trek reference, good geeks they be. I kept re-submitting the query to get more;
Funny feckers... and good geeks too! Anyway, I shall keep an eye out for more fun and keep them posted below;
"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."
"Have you ever felt stressed or lonely, and the only conversation you’ve had has been a one sided one with your cat or dog? Well now it could be possible for your pet to communicate back, with an app developed by Google that’s called “Translate for Animals.”"
"Language and translation is a major focus of our work at Google because it’s so intimately connected to our mission of making the world’s information accessible to all. Australia, with its highly idiomatic local language, was found to be a perfect test bed for the next generation of language translation technology developed locally in the Sydney office. By synthesising millions of aggregated search inputs from Australians as well as scanning 23 seasons of Home and Away scripts, we are able to Optimise for Colloquial Cultural Articulation (OCCA) - which means our products can now be tailored specifically for the typical Strayan user
"
"The next generation of Google storage arrives in May and we’re looking for testers.
* Find your keys and more
Ever wish you could CTRL+F your keys? Store your keys and other objects you commonly lose with Google and you’ll never have to worry about finding them again.
* Fast pickup and delivery
We’re testing a new mail courier network integrated with our Street View fleet. We’ll show up within 3 hours to pick up anything you choose to store in Google Docs, guaranteed.
* Competitive pricing
At $0.10 per kg, you can store a grand piano for the price of lunch. "
"Every year Google plays an April Fools Day prank. Last year, Google announced that they had created an artificial intelligence named CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity). The CADIE AI could index your brain to make your thoughts and memories searchable.
For April Fools Day 2010, Google has created 'Google Jails'."
"Well, I’m happy to announce that for those of you who turn to Google in search of, “where am I,” we finally have a better result. Starting today, just go to Google.com on your phone in the US, search for “where am I”, and wonder about your own whereabouts no more."
"TEXTp is the result of months of intense transcoding efforts by our engineers, who toiled for weeks to ensure that a large chunk of videos on the platform could be reduced to their most basic elements. By replacing the images in the video with a series of letters and numbers, the videos are far less taxing on our system -- and have the added benefit of promoting literacy!"
"As I mentioned in a previous post, we've taken several measures to help differentiate legitimate API traffic from bad requests. To help us serve you better, I'm pleased to announce a new way for you to identify your request as harmful. Beginning today, please include the &evil=true parameter in your API requests if you're one of the bad guys."
"Earth has issues, and it's time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars."
"How ReaderAdvantage™ works - It’s simple. You get one point for each item you read. The more you read, the more you get. Be the envy of all your friends and redeem your points for cool stuff. "
In the 'Fine Print;
"To earn points for offline reading, send in a photo of yourself reading the newspaper, comics, or tabloids, along with an itemized list of items read and we'll credit the points to your account in 8-12 months. Items read on toilet will not be counted."
"If you logged into Gmail over the last hour (or visited the Gmail homepage), you probably noticed that something looked a bit off: all the vowels are missing. We realize this makes things difficult for all of you who rely on Gmail — whether at home or at work — and we’re incredibly sorry. We take morphological issues like this extremely seriously, so we want to let you all know what happened and what we're doing about it."
"Translate for Animals is an application for Android phones that recognises and transcribes words and phrases that are common to a species, like cats for example. To develop Translate for Animals, we worked closely with many of the world's top language synthesis teams, and with leaders in the field of animal cognitive linguistics, including senior fellows at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. "
Comments
(but not on the toilet or my reading points don't count
anyway, yes, it's pretty cool indeed that the google geeks actually did some April's fool stuff - good on them ...
cheers,
Michiel
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