Happy April Fool’s Day from Google

It’s April Fool’s Day and that means that the Google team has been very busy planning pranks. For more than a decade, Google has been making millions laugh with fictitious products, fake announcements, and make-believe services, bringing laughs to the Web every April 1st.

Among today’s gags, Google debuted Google Nose, which enables Google user to search … for smells! Google proclaims that their flagship smell search boasts a “mobile aroma indexing program has been able to amass a 15 million scentibyte database from around the world.”

Google Maps now features Treasure Mode. After discovering a 315-year-old pirate treasure map, Google has digitized the map so searchers can “work together to decipher the clues to Captain Kidd’s buried secrets.”

Instead of searching for hot searches on Google Trends, you can search for cold searches, like ” Y2K,” “prom scrunchies” or “step-by-step Macarena.”

Then there’s Gmail Blue. This revelatory version of Gmail features—wait for it—buttons, text, lines, and even the background all in blue. Engineers explain “the inspiration of Blue came from nature. Ocean, sky, blue whales. A blue that was reminiscent of nature, but better than what nature created.”

The Google team was “faced with the challenge: how do we completely redesign and recreate something while keeping it exactly the same? The answer is Gmail Blue …  It’s Gmail, only bluer.”

And did you know today is YouTube’s last day accepting entries? YouTube (owned by trickster Google) has actually just been an eight-year contest searching after the best video ever. The competition ends tonight. YouTube released a video announcing its end, featuring some of YouTube’s greatest stars.  A staff of 30,000 technicians will review all the videos amassed over the better part of a decade. YouTube will return in 2023, when the winning video will be revealed … and will be the sole video on YouTube.

Need a little laughter in your day-to-day communications? That’s why Google came up with Google Levity. The levity algorithm optimizes content and visuals to be more appealing and fun, utilizing a repository of 50 years of comedic material from Chicago’s renowned improv group, The Second City. Drafting an email entitled “HR Memo?” Google Levity changes the title to “The New Hotness.”

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is an emoticon worth? And moreover, what is the value of a picture and an emoticon—combined? No need to wonder anymore, because Google+ has added emoticons to photos.

Need Google Fiber on the go? Google has a solution. Today, they have announced Google Fiber Poles. Google Fiber technology can now be found in utility poles. Pull up, plug in and download at Google Fiber speeds. Google Fiber isn’t just for the home anymore.

And in the Googler Spotlight, a new technology has been revealed: self-writing code. That’s right. Self-writing code.

A look back … 

Google began play April Fool’s jokes in 2000, and it’s a tradition they’ve kept up every year (except 2001 and 2003). Here is a history of Google‘s gags:

• Google Street Roo
• Google Maps 8-bit
• Google Fiber Bar
• Jargon Bot
• Google Racing
• Google Voice … For Pets
• Googler Spotlight: Staffing the Canine Team
• Interplanetary Reporting Comes to Google Analytics

2011

• Comic Sans as Google’s default font
• Google Motion
• Google Autocompleter
• Meow Me Now

2010

• Google changes name to Topeka
• Wingdings font for Adsense

2009

• Gmail Auto Pilot
• CADIE

2008

• Gmail Custom Time
• Virgle
• Adsense for Conversations

2007

• TiSP Toilet Internet Service Provider
• Gmail Paper

2006

• Google Romance

2005

• Google Gulp

2004

• Google Copernicus Center

2002

• Pigeon Rank System

2000

• MentalPlex 

Kristi Kellogg is a journalist, news hound, professional copywriter, and social (media) butterfly. Currently, she is a senior SEO content writer for Conde Nast. Her articles appear in newspapers, magazines, across the Internet and in books such as "Content Marketing Strategies for Professionals" and "The Media Relations Guidebook." Formerly, she was the social media editor at Bruce Clay Inc.

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