Wikipedians Catalogue a Dozen More Google Hoaxes on April Fools Day
The Wikipedians have been busy today updating all the Google hoaxes they’ve discovered on April Fools Day.
I won’t list them all, but here are a couple that impressed me for their creativity:
Upload and store anything in the cloud with Google Docs: Starting today, you can upload and store anything in Google Docs. Anything!
“For example, do you ever wish you could CTRL+F your house keys or your TV remote? Store your keys, remotes, rail passes, and other objects you commonly lose with Google Docs, and you’ll never have to worry about finding them again.”
Google Maps Australia: Today, it is using Australian Slang terms in the direction results.
For example, the altered directions now include “Hang a right when you get to [street name]”, “Chuck a left when you get to [street name]”, and “Ya might have to cough up some cash along here” to indicate toll booths.
Google Translate for Animals: In the UK, Google has introduced an Android application that it hopes “will allow us to better understand our animal friends. We’ve always been a pet-friendly company at Google, and we hope that Translate for Animals encourages greater interaction and understanding between animal and human.”
Translate for Animals recognizes and transcribes words and phrases that are common to a species, like cats for example. To develop Translate for Animals, Google worked closely with with “leaders in the field of animal cognitive linguistics, including senior fellows at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.”
Speed of Google search results: Finally, Google any of your favorite search terms. And Google’s search results page will display the time taken to load the results in different units than seconds.
For example, you’ll see 23.00 skidoo, centibeats, centons, epochs, femtogalactic years, gigawatts, jiffies, hertz, microfortnights, microweeks, nanocenturies, parsecs, Planck times, shakes of a lamb’s tail, times the velocity of an unladen swallow, and warp factors.
This is just a sample of what Google engineers with too much time on their hands can accomplish.