Google loves a good April Fool's Day joke. Sometimes the joke is even that it isn't a joke. Take a tour of some of Google's best April Fool's Day jokes.
1. Google Treasure Maps
2013: Google Maps announced that they were making a crowd-sourced treasure map to find the long-lost treasure of Captain Kidd. The original map was allegedly written in a code so obscure that only the power of the crowds could decode it.
2. YouTube Is Ready to Select a Winner
2013: YouTube announced that they were ready to stop taking submissions and select a winner. They would shut down the site and reopen in 2023 to display only the video of the winner.
3. Google Nose Beta
2013: Rather than just searching by words, why not search by smell? The new smell search service even promises SafeSearch options for those suspicious odors.
4. Gmail Blue
How do you reinvent something while keeping it exactly the same? You make everything blue.
5. Your Photos + Emotion
This 2013 Google+ Joke promises, "Using our massive data centers, we will plumb the emotional depths of everyone in the photo, then summarize their feelings with a beautifully crafted, emotion icon."
During the joke duration, users can select one of their photos within Google+ and then see an interpretation of the emotional expression of all the faces in the photo. It's actually a pretty sophisticated prank that gives some insight into Google's facial recognition capabilities.
6. Go Ro
The How to Go Mo site, which normally teaches people how to make mobile accessible websites for their customers is now taking it a step further and showing how to make rotary phone accessible websites for your customers.
7. Click-to-Teleport
Forget click-to-call. That's so last year. Now your customers can click to teleport directly into your store. Much faster than calling.
8. Gmail Tap
Take your keyboard from 26 keys to just two: the dot and the dash. This revolutionary "new" technology will take all the frustration out of trying to tap those tiny little keys on your smartphone.
9. Google Weather Control
Don't like the weather? Now you can change it to something more agreeable.
10. Google Really Advanced Search
Rather than just advanced search, this search finds rhyming slang or "This exact word or phrase, whose sum of unicode code points is a mersenne prime"
