April Fools Watch

Adotas mentions new AdSense unit sizes of 1×1 pixel and 2560×1920 pixels. What about people with bigger screens than that though?

How the heck did the Sydney Morning Herald find out about Google’s quantum-based spam filtering?

Philipp notices Google’s new room search prototype.

Ask introduces RhymeRank, which lets you find related queries that rhyme with your original query. It may only work in English, but that’s okay: it’s in gamma release.

Here’s my favorite though. MSN allows anyone to make up their own fake search results. I oblige. But the best part? I tried to customize the jokes in Firefox and got an error message: “xml could not be sent: Permission denied.” Meta-humor, or just incompatibility? Either way, it’s funny. Wait, I tried it in IE and it didn’t work either:

MSN April Fools

Oh well, it’s still funny. What’s the best April Fools Joke you’ve seen or done?

Update: Slashdot decided to go with a fresh new pink color scheme and ponies:

Slashdot: Pink with Ponies

Yahoo! bought all of Web 2.0! The whole shebang! I’ve done a panel at the Web 2.0 conference; does this mean that Yahoo! has also acquired . . . me?!

And Google rolls out a new product on the first day of Q2: Google Romance. I’m glad we’re applying the power of our search technology to finding that special someone. Looks like the upload has already crashed under the strain, but I was able to download the FAQ page. Here’s a couple questions:

10. What do you mean when you say Google Romance is a beta product?
What do you mean when you ask us what we mean when we say Google Romance is a beta product? It is what is it, okay? It’s new, it’s probably still buggy, which is to say that yes, by using this product now you conceivably are setting yourself up for a disastrous outcome – but on the other hand, you might also be on the verge of thrilling to an experience that will transform your very existence and only could have come about because you took this step, right here, right now. You’re online; take a chance. We may never pass this way again. Carpe diem. The world could, like, end tomorrow, you know? Gather ye rosebuds while —

11. Okay, okay, I’ll try it.
Great, babe, great.

It’s a shame I’m happily married; this looks like an interesting product. Go ahead and take the tour.

Update: Looks like there’s aliens in Google Earth and a dog on the Whitehouse lawn.

Via Philipp, there’s a ton of news. There’s the new Google Browser. Only 1.68M! Also, Google apparently acquired textfiles.com for “somewhere in the neighborhood of A Dozen Fat Sacks of Mad Cash.”. Nice. And finally, you can track zombies with Google Maps; read how on deathhacker.

If you enjoyed Guitar Hero, it looks like a sequel is coming out: Cowbell Hero! And ibiblio has proposed a <BLING> tag.

Looks like the Wikipedia entry for April Fools 2006 is doing a much better job of tracking breaking April 1st news; I’d just go there.

29 Responses to April Fools Watch (Leave a comment)

  1. I’m still kinda hoping that Big Daddy was some kind of elongated April fool. If so, that’d be great because I assume Google would then revert the indexes back to their former glory, once the joke is over.

    If I’m mistaken, and BD is not an April fool: is anyone at Google looking into the “missing pages” problem? You know, the one that huge numbers of people are reporting – where 50,000 pages of a site go AWOL from the BD index despite thse pages being crawled on a daily basis? No amount of crawling seems to put them back. This is not the same as the famous “Supplemental” problem. These missing pages are just not there.

  2. Google Stock Crashes in After-Hours Trading due to the newly installed “BigMommy” data center refusing to interface with the “BigDaddy” data center. Hopes of producing a family of “BigBaby” data centers now seem unlikely for the Internet search giant this quarter.

    Developing…
    http://hawaii-online-advertising.com/blog/

  3. best online aprils fools joke was nasas water on mars found
    and then you see a pic of a mars bar with a glass of water on it 😉

    but what about the lastest pagerank datacenter updates?
    APRIL FOOLS! ?

  4. — Wireless Extension Cords —
    Neat gadget, but just try to put it in your Shopping Cart.
    http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/wec.shtml

    — Dolphins Surfing the Internet with Opera Mini —
    So what if KDE Konqueror passed the Acid2 test?
    http://my.opera.com/djysrv/blog/show.dml/203690

  5. Sitepoint have posted a beauty today – supposedly written by Jason *Gried* of 37 *Singles*. Very clever!
    http://www.sitepoint.com/article/application-fluff-hot-air

  6. http://www.homestarrunner.com/underconstruction.html

    20XD6!

    (They hijacked their own domain with this two years ago.)

  7. Well, since this is my first year with my own blog, I’m just doing the standard “Me and the wife going bungee jumping out of a plane” scam, probably won’t fool anyone for long…

    http://heseltine.blogspot.com/2006_04_01_heseltine_archive.html

  8. Oh, and it looks like slashdot is getting in on the fun with a new design…

    ” Our marketing department has done extensive research over the last 3 quarters and discovered that our audience is strangely disproportionately skewed towards males. Like, 98.3% males to be precise. To correct this oversight, we have decided to subtly tweak Slashdot’s design and content to widen our appeal to these less active demographics. Don’t worry! We’ll still continue to serve our core audience, but we hope you’ll work with us as we try to find a balance that will work for all.”

    http://slashdot.org/articles/06/03/31/1644225.shtml

  9. Good morning Matt

    Sorry for posting off-topic.

    How come that you haven’t told us that you are moving soon toGoogle NASA office 🙂

    Congrats and good luck!.

  10. Hey Matt

    Hmmmz – I guess you know that most of us will probably go for the Bulk Upload option 😉

    User B – based on a typical Webmaster ?

  11. Also I wonder if you make a duplicate profile you end up with split personality results (split PR) and get pushed to the bottom of the result page and can only be found if a friends profile mentioned you. 😉

  12. Hey, did you hear Mozilla bought Internet Explorer?!

    Read all about it here:
    http://www.farstyle.com/web_design/mozilla_buys_internet_explorer/

    I know, I couldn’t believe it either…

  13. YOu guys have been taken over by China and you are yet blogging here?

    http://www.theregister.com/2006/04/01/china_buys_google/

  14. Mine is the latest one, Google Romance 🙂
    http://www.google.com/romance/

  15. Another one for you… Lucas films announces the new line of Adult Star Wars films including “Slave Girl of Tattooine”

    http://locusmag.com/2006/Features/0401_Adult_Star_Wars.html

  16. Dammit, I thought up the write-only memory for an article I wrote 15 years ago! The smh.com.au article pinched/nicked/stole it – hrmph!!!

  17. Hey Matt,

    (I mean Jeremy – sorry ’bout that) This was absolutely brilliant!

    http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2153220/google-brand-moon

    Nothing like getting the word out…

    Joe

  18. Maybe it is a strange aprils fool joke. But I see .eu domains are coming out! Must be a joke to stuff geo-positioning of domains – if .eu is multiple nation wide but not global how do you work out which index to display the site in.

    AS .eu hosted in the states which search listings do you put it in.

    Have fun with trying to work out which index to put it into!

  19. After checking the new “AdSense unit size”, I cant help but follow the text to checkout “milliongooglepixel.com”. Hmmm, it seems to be still available. These people really have too much time to play such a game.

  20. tres interessant votre blog

  21. vraiement sympa votre blog

  22. .

  23. Google romance! I need to try that!

  24. Go Cowbell Hero!

  25. Tried Adsense and did not muck luck!

  26. We own and operate our own network of sites and this is info has been very useful. Sculpting PR has never been high on our agenda, we achieve high PR quickly by establishing sites with strong friendly URL structures, great title tags and brilliant content. We predominantly focus on usability and the architecture behind this.

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