Google's April Fool 2008

** Google announces technology that searches tomorrow's web, today. Google Australia today announced the launch of gDay™, a new beta search technology that will search web pages 24 hours before they are created.

View
http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/gday/press.html

** Google announces a joint project with the Virgin Group that aims to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars. This operation has been named Project Virgle. It also includes videos of Richard Branson as well as Larry Page & Sergey Brin (The Founders of Google) on YouTube , talking about Virgle.
View
http://www.google.com/virgle/index.html






** Google launches Dajare in Japan (google.co.jp), with the mission of "organizing the world’s laughter." Dajare, as Wikipedia explains, is a kind of comical Japanese wordplay, “similar in spirit to an English pun relying on similarities in the pronunciation of words to create a simple joke.”

** Google also introduced a new feature called "Gmail Custom Time". Google claimed a new Gmail feature had been added that would allow people to date stamp their emails in the past, allowing for all sorts of mischief. Users would be limited to 10 Custom Times a year to minimize the number of fraudulent emails. Clicking any of the three links at the bottom of the page brought the user to a page indicating that Gmail Custom time was, in fact, their April Fools prank for 2008.

** Google Book Search has a new feature: capturing a book's smell. Inside Google Book Search Blog - "I'm pleased to let you know that we've made some headway with one type of volume we've struggled with in the past: books employing scratch-and-sniff technology. Using special equipment and tricky JavaScript, we're now able to capture some of the smells during the scanning process and then embed them in your web browser when you preview these titles in Google Book Search."