Posted
on April 1, 2014
Did
you know that, in 2010, Topeka, Kansas, unofficially changed its name
to Google for the entire month of March?
The
unofficial name change was a publicity stunt, of course – an
attempt to “re-brand” the city as the capital of fiber optics. I
guess someone in Topeka was trying to lure Google to choose Topeka as
the chosen one that would work with Google to build a new fiber optic
network that is 100 times faster than anything offered before!
We're
talking fast. We're talking 3D live video conferencing. We're talking
5-minute downloads of HDTV quality movies.
However,
Topeka wasn't chosen; instead, nearby Kansas City, Kansas, will be
the lucky city to help bring the next generation of the internet to
reality.
Still,
on this date in 2010, Google responded to Topeka's pretend
name-change with a pretend name-change of its own. If people used the
popular search engine on that day, they were presented with this:
In
2008, Google had a lot of different jokes, in different countries and
different parts of its growing empire of websites. One of the
strangest is, in Google Books, Google presented a new feature:
Scratch 'n' Sniff books. Users were asked to place their noses near
their monitors and then click “Go,” which then “loads odors.”
In a related prank, on April 1, 2013, Google launched a fake product
called “Google Nose.” It claimed to search for smells, with a 15
million scentibyte database of smells from all over the world. |
| Google isn't the only company that pulls April Fools' pranks. This is what its biggest competition, Bing, presented on April Fools' Day last year! |
Even
though I am writing this post BEFORE April 1, 2014, there are already
Google pranks listed for 2014 in Wikipedia! See if you can
hear or see anything unusual when you enter Google Images, Gmail, and
Google Maps? Can you spot any other jokes?
Also
on this date:
Plan
ahead:
Check
out my Pinterest boards for:
And
here are my Pinterest boards for:
