The Museum of Hoaxes
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April Fool's Day Archive, Contents:
Before 1900: Origin of April Fool's Day | 1700-1799 | 1800-1899
Early 1900s: 1900 | 1901 | 1915 | 1919 | 1920 | 1923 | 1925
1930s & 40s: 1933 | 1934 | 1936 | 1937 | 1938 | 1940 | 1949
1950s & 60s: 1950 | 1957 | 1959 | 1960 | 1962 | 1965 | 1969
1970s: 1970 | 1971 | 1972 | 1973 | 1974 | 1975 | 1976 | 1977 | 1978 | 1979
1980s: 1980 | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1984 | 1985 | 1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989
1990s: 1990 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999
2000s: 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009
2010s: 2010 | 2011
category
Google
Google Nose (2013)
Google announced Google Nose Beta — allowing people to smell what they searched for online. The company explained that they had leveraged "new and existing technologies to offer the sharpest olfactory experience available," with their "street sense vehicles" roaming far and wide to index millions of different scents, thereby creating the "Google Aromabase" of 15M+ "scentibytes."


The scents were smellable by people at their computers because Google was supposedly able to manipulate the photons coming out of the screen, causing them to intersect with "infrasound waves," thereby temporarily aligning molecules to emulate particular scents.



The hoax recalled the BBC's Smellovision April Fool's Day hoax of 1965, in which the broadcaster claimed to have perfected technology allowing aromas produced in a television studio to be smelled via TV sets in people's homes.
Categories: Internet Technology, Businesses, United States, 2013, Internet, Google.
Gmail Motion (2011)
Google debuted a new feature — Gmail Motion — designed to allow people to eliminate the use of keyboards and mice and instead write emails using only gestures, which Gmail would track using your computer webcam and a "spatial tracking algorithm." Command gestures were simple. To open a message, make a motion with your hands as if you're opening an envelope. To reply, point backward over your shoulder with your thumb. To reply all, point backward with both thumbs.

The home page for the new application featured videotaped commentary from experts such as Dennis Tooley, Ph.D. from the "California Center for Kinesics and Paralanguage," and Lorraine Klayman, M.Sc., an "Environmental Movement Specialist at Nevada Polytechnic College."

Google did note that safety precautions should be observed before using Gmail Motion. Users were advised to clear 4 feet of space around them and to take breaks every 30-40 minutes. link: Gmail Motion Beta.

Categories: Technology, Internet Technology, Businesses, Websites, United States, 2011, Fictitious Products, Google.
Google gBall (2009)
Google Australia announced it had partnered with the Australian rules football league to develop the gBall:

The gBall contains inbuilt GPS and motion sensor systems to monitor the location, force and torque of each kick. The data is interpreted by a new curvilenear parabolic approximation algorithm developed in Google's Sydney office, known as DENNIS ("Dimensional, Elastic, Non-Linear, Network-Neutral, Inertial Sequencing"), which plots the ball's trajectory, accuracy and distance.
Using artificial intelligence technology, Google can provide users - from amateurs to professional players - with detailed online kicking tips, style suggestions and tutorials based on their gBall kicking data.
Kicking data is also sent to national talent scouts and player agents. The gBall will vibrate if talent scouts or player agents want to make contact with the user. Users can log in to their gBall account to make contact.
Categories: Sports, Internet Technology, Businesses, Australia, 2009, Fictitious Products, Google.
Gmail Autopilot (2009)
Google unveiled Gmail Autopilot, a feature that automatically reads and responds to your email, saving you the time of doing this. It boasted that Autopilot could mirror any communication style, could also work for Gmail chat, and would work even if both sender and recipient had Autopilot on:
Two Gmail accounts can happily converse with each other for up to three messages each. Beyond that, our experiments have shown a significant decline in the quality ranking of Autopilot's responses and further messages may commit you to dinner parties or baby namings in which you have no interest.
Categories: Internet Technology, Businesses, Websites, United States, 2009, Internet, Google.
YouTube Rickrolls its Visitors (2008)
YouTube UK and Australia "rickrolled" their visitors, rickrolling being a popular bait-and-switch-style prank in which people are baited into clicking on a link that sends them to a video of 1980s pop singer Rick Astley singing his hit Never Gonna Give You Up. All the "featured video" links on YouTube's front page sent people to a rickroll page set up by YouTube under the user name YTRickRollsYou. Over 7 million people were rickrolled by the site. (YouTube is owned by Google.)
Categories: Music, Businesses, Websites, Australia, United Kingdom, 2008, Internet, Bait and Switch, Google.
gDay Mate (2008)
Google Australia debuted gDay technology "enabling you to search content on the internet before it is created":

The core technology that powers gDay™ is MATE™ (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation). Using MATE's™ machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques developed in Google's Sydney offices, we can construct elements of the future. Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now. We can use this technique to predict almost anything on the web – tomorrow's share price movements, sports results or news events. Plus, using language regression analysis, Google can even predict the actual wording of blogs and newspaper columns, 24 hours before they're written!
Categories: Technology, Internet Technology, Time and Date, Businesses, Websites, Australia, 2008, Google.
Toilet Internet Service Provider (2007)
Google announced a new technology called TiSP (Toilet Internet Service Provider) that would allow it to provide free in-home wireless broadband service. Users would connect to the internet via their bathroom's plumbing system. Installation involved dropping a weighted fiber-optic cable down the toilet and then activating the "patented GFlush™ system" which would send the cable "surfing through the plumbing system to one of the thousands of TiSP Access Nodes." Google promised that it would provide a higher-performance version of the service for businesses which would include "24-hour, on-site technical support in the event of backup problems, brownouts and data wipes."
Categories: Technology, Computers, Businesses, Websites, United States, 2007, Internet, Google.
Google Copernicus Center (2004)
Google announced that they were accepting applications for positions at Copernicus Center, their new "lunar hosting and research center." Applicants, Google noted, must be "capable of surviving with limited access to such modern conveniences as soy low-fat lattes, The Sopranos and a steady supply of oxygen." Google went on to say that the facility, set to open in Spring 2007, would house 35 engineers, 27,000 low cost Web servers, two massage therapists and a sushi chef.
Categories: Space and Astronomy, Businesses, Websites, United States, 2004, Employment, Internet, Google.
PigeonRank (2002)

Google revealed the secret at the heart of its search technology: PigeonRank. Clusters of pigeons had been trained to compute the relative values of web pages:
PigeonRank's success relies primarily on the superior trainability of the domestic pigeon (Columba livia) and its unique capacity to recognize objects regardless of spatial orientation… By collecting flocks of pigeons in dense clusters, Google is able to process search queries at speeds superior to traditional search engines, which typically rely on birds of prey, brooding hens or slow-moving waterfowl to do their relevance rankings. When a search query is submitted to Google, it is routed to a data coop where monitors flash result pages at blazing speeds. When a relevant result is observed by one of the pigeons in the cluster, it strikes a rubber-coated steel bar with its beak, which assigns the page a PigeonRank value of one. For each peck, the PigeonRank increases. Those pages receiving the most pecks, are returned at the top of the user's results page with the other results displayed in pecking order.
Categories: Technology, Computers, Birds, Businesses, Websites, United States, 2002, Google.
Google Mentalplex (2000)
Google unveiled "MentalPlex" search technology that read the user's mind to determine what the user wanted to search for, thus eliminating the need for typing. Users were invited to peer intently at an animated spinning circle while projecting a mental image of their search request.
Categories: Internet Technology, Websites, 2000, Internet, Google.