April Fools: Google's best jokes

Google takes April Fools very, very seriously...

Google changes its name: In homage to the US city of Topeka – which recently changed its name to Google in the hope of winning a place on Google's new broadband rollout scheme – Google announced that it is changing its name to Topeka. "We've been wondering how best to honour that moving gesture," wrote Google on its blog. We didn't reach the decision to change our name lightly; after all, we had a fair amount of brand equity tied up in our old name. But the more we surfed around Topeka's municipal website, the more kinship we felt with this fine city at the edge of the Great Plains."

YouTube cuts costs: Google said it was going to cut the cost of running its video clip website by adding a text-only mode. "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 in to our bottom line," said YouTube on its blog. "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!"

Google Wave notifications: Google has announced a new notification service for its Google Wave account – a man who comes up and physically waves at you whenever you have a new message.


Google Search: Type in a search in the box, and Google will tell you how long it took to find a list of results. A search for "space", for instance, takes 0.20 cantons.

Google Books: Google's digitised books collection can now be "viewed in 3D".

Google Docs: Google has taken its cloud computing service to another level, offering to store everything from keys to train tickets in Google Docs so "you'll never have to worry about finding them again".

Google Translate: Ever wanted to talk to the animals? Google Translate makes the dream a reality, with an Android app that translates "words and phrases that are common to a species".

Google Maps: Australian users of Google Maps have been greeted with a localised version of Google's mapping service, which tells them to "chuck a right" rather than make a right turn.

Google Voice: Google has launched a retro voicemail service – messages will be deleted after 14 days "so you don't have to listen to them", and users will only be able to access their voicemails on their phone, rather than via the web. Just like the good old days.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk