April Fool's Hoaxes

The Museum of Hoaxes lists the top 100 April Fool's Day hoaxes of all time. A nice way to spend April Fool's Day is to peruse their gallery of unbelievable hoaxes, some of which must have taken considerable thought, effort, and even money to pull off!  And when you're through with that, take a look at Wikipedia's chronology of pretty much all of Google's April Fool's jokes. Google has been pulling off these jokes ever since 2000 when they invented their MentalPlex to make searching easier :p  Someday they really may invent this thing, whenever we're able to plug ourselves neurologically into the internet. For now, we'll have to settle for searching the old-fashioned way, using our current faculties.

Feeling Lucky? Or Trendy? Maybe Hungry!

I only recently noticed this Google Easter Egg when I saw that mousing over the I'm Feeling Lucky button would cause it to whir and provide more choices. This feature actually came out a few months ago and some websites, such as Mashable, did discuss it, but it flew below my radar. In addition to feeling lucky, you may feel trendy, wonderful, stellar, puzzled, doodley, artistic, or playful. And if you're hungry, the Lucky button will show you some good eateries in your neck of the woods. Round and round it goes, where it stops, nobody knows...

Googling the UnGoogleable

Servers inside a Google data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Just read an interesting article in MIT Technology Review about Google's work on basically reading people's minds. To that end, the search engine behemoth conducted a random survey last month asking people, “What did you want to know recently?” Much of the data relates to the way people use their mobile devices to find contextual information based largely on location. Googling is rapidly becoming our second brain - actually, our main brain since we don't often know what we're looking for until Google tells us! MIT Technology Review does a great job keeping us up-to-date on Google's research - take a look at their archive of articles on this topic.

Bing it On!

Bing it On!

No typo there, Bing is challenging Google to a search-off with a side-by-side comparison of their search results. It's a blind test because the results for each search engine display randomly on the right and left and you have to choose which you find most relevant. I tried it and found I'm a Googler at heart. Of course, which results you pick is sometimes just personal preference, but I somehow picked Google's results over Bing's most often.  A couple of times my choice was a draw, but when I picked the winner, it was always Google. A CNET writer found the results interesting when he took the test, but a Betanews writer found it a turn-off. So, what does this mean? I guess maybe Bing still has some work to do, but I still visit the page every day to see the daily images, which are dear to my heart. For a great archive of Bing images, I recommend istartedsomething's website. Take a look at my results below (click the image to see my search queries).



My Bing it On test results (click to see larger image with my search queries)

Google's Sense of Humor

Felix the Cat

This item may be best discussed on April Fool's Day, but by the time it rolls around, I'll forget about it or something else will displace it. So, this is as good a time as any to post this Wiki page about Google's hoaxes and easter eggs. You can tell this topic is near and dear to people's hearts as this page is mega-comprehensive! And on another somewhat related subject, how about some funny 404 pages? Something to do when the internet just seems stale and tired.