Google never fails to disappoint when announcing new products or services, real or fake, since April Fool’s Day, 2000, except in 2001.
On April 1, 2010, users of Google found that the search engine company changed its logo to “Topeka”, alluding to Topeka, Kansas, one of the communities in the United States vying for Google’s “ultra high-speed” broadband network known as Google Fiber. The search engine’s blog discusses the similarities between the growth of the company and the state capital of Kansas, as well as the ramifications of the abrupt name change with its services and products. As acknowledgment to its verbification, the blog also discusses the proper usage of “Topeka”.
Google has had a tradition of announcing new services on April 1, leading many to believe that every release would be fake, such as Google MentalPlex in 2000, Pigeon Rank in 2002, and Google Copernicus Center, which offered engineering positions at their lunar hosting and research center on the Moon, in 2004. However, Google also announced Gmail, a free, advertising-supported webmail service. Gmail’s storage capacity of 1 GB, unheard of at a time when webmail offered free storage from 2 to 4MB, led people to believe that Gmail was a hoax, but the service, albeit invitation-only, later proved legitimate.
Read about all of the April Fool’s Day hoaxes that Google has taken part of for nearly a decade here. The carefully crafted humor reflects Google’s employees and the company’s business culture at each release. What April Fool’s Day hoaxes will Google come up with in the future? We shall wait and see.
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