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March 31, 2010

Google April Fools' Day 2010

It's not a surprise for anyone that Google celebrates April Fools' Day. Since 2008, Google's offices outside of US have their own pranks.

Google Japan developed a special version of Google Voice Search for animals. Unfortunately, Google Translate is not very helpful:

"For this animal, the dog still, cats, pigeons are just the future, cows and horses, hamsters, frogs, and plans to expand into. Voice Search a variety of potential animal, you try all means, exchange'd appreciate help with animals. Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful to the people around the world. You are also feeling the animal to be able to access, will continue to continue research, and Nakajima are saying."



There's also Google Translate for Animals, a new Android application that "allows you to record animals sounds and have the sounds analyzed and translated by Google Translate into any of the 52 supported languages".


Google Australia is now able to "Optimise for Colloquial Cultural Articulation (OCCA) - which means our products can now be tailored specifically for the typical Strayan user. (...) OCCA greatly reduces the latency between a user's thought and ability to pinpoint information; a boon for local users who'd have Buckleys makin' sense of American English."


Google Street View is now available in 3D, but you need to click on an icon to go 3D:


Google decided to change its name to Topeka, the US city that intends to change its name to Google.


Google's search results pages use some interesting units of measurements to estimate how long it took Google to obtain the results: Plunk, gigawatts, warp, centibeats, skidoo, femtogalactic years, velocity of an unladen swallow.



YouTube has a new text-only mode: TEXTp. "It's great news that there are 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, we support 1080p and HD uploads are rising quickly, but that's also meant increasing bandwidth costs cutting into our bottom line. (...) 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!"

You can try the new mode by appending &textp=fool to YouTube URLs (like this).



Google Docs lets you store ANYTHING. "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. 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. At $0.10 per kg, you can store a grand piano for the price of lunch."

Google Voice added a standard voicemail mode.
Standard Voicemail Mode brings your voicemail back to something reminiscent of 1997, with features like:

* Automatic voicemail deletion: messages will be deleted automatically after 14 days
* Numeric keypad access: access to voicemail will only be available via your phone
* Beeper interoperability: your beeper will be paged every time a voicemail is left
* Message maximums: store a maximum of 10 messages at any given time
* Numeric page: people leaving you voicemails will be given the option to send a numeric page

Google Mobile Search found a way to return better results for queries like "where am I". Try this query on your mobile phone and you'll find a lot of interesting results:



Gmail's login page no longer uses vowels and greets users with a short message: "Wlcm t Gml".

48 comments:

  1. Dunno if its only in Australia, but StreetView has a 3D view thingy for today's april fools :)

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  2. I'm probably being stupid here, but is that screenshot real? As in from the real Google Maps? It'd be really cool if it was all 3D, but as it's today i doubt it. Link please :)

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  3. Yes, it's real and it's from Google Maps.

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  4. The 3d is not real. Thay just distort the image for one of the eyes. Not cool as much as some of you will think...

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  5. Could you provide a link? I'm not seeing it anywhere. I tried google.com, .co.uk, .co.au in Opera and Chromium on Linux and IE8 on XP

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  6. @KenBW2:

    I've picked a random Street View image from maps.google.com, so there's no special URL.

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  7. Is google using dolphin web browser in the video ?!

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  8. Saw it too. I've got a pair of those glasses for that, and it actually looks better with this. But well, as long it's just a frozen image it's nothing special to use..

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  9. @KenBW2
    its .com.au not .co.au

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  10. The results on google.com have different time references for amount of time the search took
    Examples:
    1.28 times the velocity of an unladen swallow
    2.00 shakes of a lamb's tail
    53.67 jiffies

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  11. and google maps had some nice colloquialisms for April Fools day - like "Fang a hard right" "A smidge to the left mate" etc etc

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  12. Google Implements Predictive Searching...
    http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2010/04/01/google-implements-predictive-searching

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  13. Youtube has a special text feature "to reduce bandwidth". Here's the link to the blog: http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/

    Although it is not working for me cnet reported it to be working ...

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  14. Not sure if this is april's fool but:

    http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/03/3d-books-google-books-now-offers.html

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  15. Topeka is the new Google name?? April Fool!!! But they did have me for a second!!

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  16. Google is now known as Topeka
    http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/different-kind-of-company-name.html

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  17. Store anything!
    http://www.google.com/google-d-s/promos/storage.html
    http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/03/upload-and-store-anything-in-cloud-with.html

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  18. Topeka is now known as Google

    http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/02/google.kansas.topeka/index.html

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  19. Topeka... Brilliant

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  20. Great background music ! http://googlemapsapi.blogspot.com/

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  21. Get Wavewave. Wave notifications for Google Wave. http://wave.google.com/getwavewave.html

    "Featured notifiers: Ashton Kutcher; Dr. Wave; Grandma; Werner Heisenberg; Puppy. Please note that some notifiers are not available at all times."

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  22. top city? they know that? i feel like a special lil topekan!

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  23. that's just crazy!

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  24. How stupid. I hope that they didn't change their name to Topeka. That would be dumb.

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  25. Awesome April Fool's Day prank! You are geniuses! You couldn't have chosen a better town. It's as midwest America as you can get.

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  26. Awesome, my favorite one is the Animal Translate.

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  27. While it doesn't work on my 32bit Ubuntu install, I find this idea kinda funny:
    http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/04/unmuting-web-with-google-chrome.html
    Sounds as you browse! (a.k.a. Internet Explorer link click sounds taken to a new level!)

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  28. Ahh shucks....you had me

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  29. Awesome pranks. Here's some with a movie theme: http://thebestpictureproject.wordpress.com/2010/04/01/april-fool%E2%80%99s-pranks-for-the-film-nut/

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  30. Check out the Chrome Extension https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/kkfibincabhfblmkmhcabnlghmncdcaf/

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  31. We all celebrate April fool day, Most of the user love Google for all these reason, Google always updates itself according to the festivals and celebration, very happy to hear the news.

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  32. Translate for Animals made my day :)

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  33. It's very nice.i'm like it
    Thanks

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  34. great beauty captures me' but a beauty still greater frees me even from itself.

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  35. I fell for the name change, hook, line and sinker. I thought Google had lost its mind changing the company name like that. Didn't even notice the other pranks. Well done Google!

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  36. ... oh!!! My gog. I Love GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOGle!!!!! :D

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  37. Few minutes of healthy and refreshing laugh. Thank you, g-guys!

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  38. I really fell for the Topeka! i even imagined how i would tell my children: i still remember when it was called google and not topeka...

    haha..tht was brilliant. i found out until the next day.

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  39. خیلی چاکریم گوگل
    tanx gooooooooooooogle

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  40. I love to see google actually making that animal translator

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  41. ye but seing as ther asian i wud actually believe this haha....wel i wudnt but id be more likely to

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  42. I fell for this one hook line and sinker and even did a blog post on it.

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