April Fools’ Day 2009: Google CADIE & More From Search Industry

It is days like this I dread as a reporter. Today is April Fools Day, and you need to be on the lookout for what is real news and what is fake news. Below, a roundup of some of the April Fools hoaxes from the search industry, starting with Google.

With Google, it all starts with their announcement on the launch of CADIE, which is short for Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity. The write up is extremely geeky, but it basically means that they designed an intelligent computer that is smart enough to do things on its own. This concept expands into dozens of different Google property hoaxes including:

• The CADIE developed 3D Chrome browser
• Auto-pilot Gmail
• Google Brain Search mobile
• Upside down YouTube (more on that here)
• Google Australia’s gBall
• How CADIE connects on video
• CADIE’s hilarious personal blog
• CADIE’s favorite places on Google Maps
• Google’s Knol was taken over by CADIE
• It improved Google Docs
• The pigeon was added by CADIE to Google China
• CADIE made it to Japan.
• Picasa added auto-red eye addition (not reduction)
• Google Earth has CADIE as well.
• CADIE even overtook the Google twitter account.

Google Blogscoped covered many of the Google April Fools gimmicks, as did Google Operating System.

There are also dozens of non-official Google hoaxes, which you can find in TechCrunch’s post. That covers most of Google’s April Fools’ day gimmicks.

Let’s move on to Yahoo, which launched a new search service named Ideological Search. Ideological Search basically allows searchers to “control the ideology of their search results for the first time in search technology history.” Pretty clever.

Live.com redid their home page, which is simple and works:

And Live Search rebranded as “MSN Windows Live Search on kumo@microsoft.com.”

Others:

• Reddit looks just like Digg, now that is funny.
• Cre8asite Forums is now Cre8aBanana forums
• Search Engine Roundtable scares users with kernel panics for Mac users and blue screen of death for PC users
• Quniura Blog highlights Yandex, Quintura and Google Russia’s pranks.
• Even us at Search Engine Land have our own hoax in the article named Search Community Outrage Builds Over Proposed New Match Types.

We hope to keep updating this post to collect more search industry specific April Fool’s day topics. Feel free to add more in the comments area.

To see last year’s pranks, click here. To see a full timeline of Google’s April Fool’s Day hoaxes, see Wikipedia.