April Fool’s Day is a big holiday at Google. This year you saw the toilet broadband service and of course the paper version of Gmail. A fun quote from that page:

“Now that I have Gmail Paper, I understand the difference between labels and
folders. I had one message with two labels, but when I tried to stick the
paper version into two filing cabinets at the same time, it just wouldn’t go.”
Mayumi M., Associate

The search industry got into April Fool’s this year. One of my favorite sites was CuttsCon, which is a fake site that announces a Matt Cutts-related search get together. Whoever made this site showed a lot more creativity and attention to detail than I did — they even get my favicon right! Some of the posts on that site are ones that I would write, like an article about “cats of SEO.” Danny alerted me to this site just before April Fool’s began, and when I looked at the site, I realized that it linked to a bunch of my posts that would show the hacked page, so the two April Fool’s Day jokes interacted in a suboptimal way. That’s why next year I want to help form a April Fool’s committee that will act as a centralized clearinghouse of search-related pranks to make sure that they don’t conflict with each other.
For other search-related April Fool’s jokes, start with Nathan Weinberg’s list of pranks. Then move on to this master list from Search Engine Land. A few other good pranks:
- Jim Lanzone’s video announces that Ask is joining forces with Kevin Federline. Lanzone will now be moved to the post of “President of Keeping It Real.” Nice.
- Google Operating System reported on Google Writer, a new tool that will write most of your blog posts for you.
- DaveN got in on the holiday by pointing to a Vanessa Fox nude site. The joke, of course, is that the site presents an unvarnished (nude) peek into what Vanessa is really thinking.
There were a lot of non-search jokes this year too. Two huge lists:
- this is the biggest list I saw
- the Wikipedia list of 2007 jokes
Did anyone do fun jokes at home? (By the way, yes, I was joking about forming a centralized April Fool’s committee.)


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