We could do the same again right now, because Google has tried to top itself with another round of April Fool’s Day jokes that pretty well span the globe of Google’s international properties. Below is a recap of Google’s (and a few others) pranks, and we’ll do our best to update this as the day goes along.

Google Racing: Self-Driving Cars Hit NASCAR

The main joke at the moment is Google’s “announcement” of a partnership with NASCAR called Google Racing, which brings Google’s self-driving cars to NASCAR race tracks “by the middle of next season.”

There’s also a faux news video about Google Racing (with no embed code – the cruelest joke of all!) starring Jeff Gordon and a couple other NASCAR drivers, not to mention Sergey Brin pretending to be Google’s first NASCAR driver … or whatever you call the person who doesn’t actually drive the car.

And if you go to Google.com, the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button has been renamed “I’m Steering Lucky” and there’s a link to the Google Racing microsite.

Google Maps In 8-Bit For NES

Google’s pranks began early this morning with a blog post announcing that Google Japan has created an 8-bit version of Google Maps for the original Nintendo Entertainment System.

You can relive all your favorite 1980s graphics by clicking the “Quest” button in the upper right corner on maps.google.com.

Google Street Roo

In Australia, where Google Street View cars and trikes can’t get to remote areas of the continent, Google says it’ll use kangaroos with mini-cameras mounted on their noggins to photograph the Australian outback. They’re calling it Google Street Roo. Hopefully the 1,000-plus kangaroos won’t mistakenly collect any personal data via wifi while they’re hopping across Australia.

Google China: Underwater Search

I said it was worldwide, right? Well, even Google China has gotten in the act with an underwater search gag. It’s more like a Google doodle than a prank, though.

Google’s Really Advanced Search

Speaking of search, this one will probably go over well with our audience. Google’s really advanced search page has some pretty funny options, like this:

You can also narrow your results based on what font the page uses, what textured background the page has and which “embarrassing grammatical faux pas” is found on the page. If you’re into SEO, you’ll like this one. You may even find yourself wishing that the page actually worked.

Google Search: Weather Control

Another search gag: Google Weather Control. Type in any weather-related search (like “seattle weather”) and you can make the weather anything you want it to be. You can turn Seattle into Phoenix, if you’d like.

Google AdWords: Click-to-Teleport

The AdWords team has a new extension called Click-to-Teleport that lets “potential customers to instantly teleport to your business location directly from a search ad.”

The YouTube Collection

YouTube’s annual April Fool’s Day prank is the YouTube Collection — all of YouTube on DVD. Once you order, 175 trucks will deliver the DVDs right to your door. Oh, just watch the video. Make your checks payable to “Matt McGee” if you’re planning to order.

Play Music In Google Analytics

I’m not seeing this (yet?) in my Google Analytics account, but this Aussie blog says there’s a little music icon on the Visitors Overview page in Google Analytics. You can play a piano or sitar while enjoying (or bemoaning) your website’s performance.

Google Chrome Multitask Mode

The Google Chrome team thinks one mouse/hand isn’t enough for web browsing, so they’ve launched Multitask Mode — two mice/hands at once.

Gmail Tap

Gmail Tap converts your keyboard from 26 letters to just two — dots and dashes, just like Morse code.

Google Fiber Bar

Forget that fiber optic network thing. Google Fiber is actually just a fiber-filled candy bar that helps you be up to 100 times more productive than ever before.

That’s Not All…

There are other search-related April Fool’s Day gags, perhaps my favorite of which is Google Nigeria, which jokingly asks you to input your bank account number so you can “search for inheritance.”

Don’t be alarmed: the search box just runs a normal Google search (not that you’d actually put your bank account number in there, anyway, right?) and, while this is NOT an official Google gag, it also doesn’t appear to be run by some Nigerian prince. (It’s a production from 85by55.com.)

There’s also TheGoogleButton.com, which lets you make a fake Google search result page with whatever website (and title/snippet) you want in the No. 1 spot.

Flickr has announced that all photos can now be seen in the 1980s style “Atkinson dither,” accessible via a small button in the lower right part of any photo page.

And last, and probably not least, the folks at Reddit announced “reddit timeline,” which brings a touch of Facebook to the proceedings and is pretty funny — especially when you click on “1970s” and get the animated rainbow header, along with “news” about Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the war in Vietnam.

And now that April Fool’s Day has actually begun … time to sign-off, at least until the next prank comes along.

Postscript:

As expected, we have a few more pranks to add and they all come from Google. Here you go!

GoRo: Google Mobile

Google Mobile has introduced a program called GoRo — the name is a play on the actual “Go Mo” campaign — that encouraged business owners to learn how to optimize their websites for rotary phones. Why? Because “technology is cyclical.”

Google Analytics: Interplanetary Reporting

Google Analytics jokingly wrote about a sneak preview of “interplanetary reports” that let website owners “understand visitor activities from neighboring stars and planets.”

Interplanetary reports will be rolled out in 2030, Google says, “when we anticipate local space travel becomes widespread.” Heh. Watch them be right about that part.

Google AdWords: Planetary Targeting

The AdWords folks didn’t stop just with Click-to-Teleport (see above). Oh no, there’s more. If you login to your AdWords account and edit location settings on one of your campaigns, you’ll see a joke about being able to do planetary targeting.

And yes, if you follow through and type “Mars,” for examplem, it shows up as one of the targeting options. There’s even a fake support page explaining how it all “works.”

At least I think it’s fake. Who can tell anymore?

From the Google blog post announcing the video, Google sums up its approach to improving search: “Our goal is to get you to the answer you’re looking for faster and faster, creating a nearly seamless connection between your questions and the information you seek. That means you don’t generally need to know about the latest search feature in order to take advantage of it.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Along with the video, Google created a timeline of search features:

Click here to see a larger version of the timeline.

Inside Google’s Time Warp

As searchers, we want fresh results, which Google usually provides. But Google also offers many other services, such as Google Docs, Gmail, and so on, that rely on much more accurate time stamping. Like most other online services, Google uses a service called the “Network Time Protocol” (NTP), which periodically checks a computer’s time against a more accurate server, such as an atomic clock. NTP also takes into account variable factors like how long the NTP server takes to reply, or the speed of the network between you and the server when setting a to-the-second or better time on the computer you’re using. So most of the time (so to speak) you can rely on Google to be spot-on when it comes to time-stamping everything you do.

Problem: Leap years. Of even more concern: Leap seconds. As Christopher Pascoe, Google Site Reliability Engineer writes on the Google blog, “It turns out that being on a revolving imperfect sphere floating in space, being reshaped by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and being dragged around by gravitational forces makes your rotation somewhat irregular. These fluctuations in Earth’s rotational speed mean that even very accurate clocks, like the atomic clocks used by global timekeeping services, occasionally have to be adjusted slightly to bring them in line with ‘solar time.’”

For most of us, that second of flux is something that (if we even notice it) is irrelevant. But for Google, which may process thousands or even millions of events during that transitional second, this can lead to major problems.

According to Pascoe, “Our systems are engineered for data integrity, and some will refuse to work if their time is sufficiently “wrong.” We saw some of our clustered systems stop accepting work on a small scale during the leap second in 2005, and while it didn’t affect the site or any of our data, we wanted to fix such issues once and for all.”

Google’s solution? Adding what they call a “leap smear,”—injecting code that would effectively “lie” to its own servers during the day that a leap second was taking place. Pascoe again: “We modified our internal NTP servers to gradually add a couple of milliseconds to every update, varying over a time window before the moment when the leap second actually happens. This meant that when it became time to add an extra second at midnight, our clocks had already taken this into account, by skewing the time over the course of the day.”

Lest you think this was a trivial patch, Google actually developed some serious math to solve the problem, and performed two “smears” (one going back in time, the other pushing into the future) and tested them using about 10,000 servers, comparing “standard atomic time,” their own servers and a variety of public NTP clients.

The result? Google has figured out how halt the ravages of time (at least in this case). For more of the science and math behind the fix, check out the official Google blog post.

We’re delighted to have some of the world’s foremost experts on Google joining us at SMX East on Tuesday, September 13th to discuss these issues, and more. Jeff Jarvis, author of What Would Google Do?, and Steven Levy, author of In the Plex will be joined by Marc Rotenberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and myself in a wide-ranging, no-holds-barred discussion on Google’s future direction. It’s certain to be an illuminating and provocative session.

The session is only open to those with full conference passes. However, both Jeff and Steven will be on hand to sign their books for all SMX attendees.

Just register in advance for a free Expo + Pass, and you’ll be able to get your copies of What Would Google Do? and In the Plex personally inscribed by the authors in the book signing area (look for the signs outside the meeting rooms). Don’t have the books? No worries—copies will be available for purchase at the show. You’ll also be able to attend the expo hall, when it opens at noon.

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to hear some of the world’s most Google-savvy people prognosticate on the company’s future. It’s just one of more than 60+ sessions at SMX East at the Javits Center in New York City, September 13-15th. Register today!

Essentially, this service will be Google fetching the content on your web site and then serving it up with speed improvements of 25% to 60% to the rest of the world, including Google’s bots.

Google will eventually charge for the service but has not yet said how the pricing structure will look. The service includes:

• An online service that automatically speeds up loading of your web pages.
• Switch your domain name to point to Google’s DNS.
• Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers
• It rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices
• It then serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe.
• The service will do the concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices.

To sign up, use this web form. Note, Google will likely eventually charge you for this service and they are not disclosing how much it will cost at this point in time.

I find it interesting that Google is getting into the content delivery game, I know they are obsessed with speed and it will help the web get faster but it just seems strange to me.

Related Stories:

• It’s Official: Google Now Counts Site Speed As A Ranking Factor
• Site Speed, Google’s Next Ranking Factor
• Google’s Push To Speed Up Your Web Site
• Google Launches Page Speed Analyzer In Labs
• Google Releases Page Speed Report In Webmaster Tools
• Google Launches Server Tool To Speed Up The Web

Over the years, Google has continued to add new products, services, portals, and features to their portfolio. Keeping up on all that Google has to offer has been hard.

There are pages that show Google products options, or new products and pages that have Google ad options and the list goes on and on. One single page of all of Google’s services and products is hard to put together, so Google designed wdyl.com to let users search for the Google product they want.

How well does it work? Well, I searched for email trying to see if Google would return Gmail, the very popular Google email service, as a top listing. Guess what? Gmail is the second to last option on the right column.

Let’s not get into asking Google to find a search engine. I guess Google’s relevancy algorithm is not yet there for this service?

Here is an image of the search results for ‘email’:

Hat tip to TechCrunch for covering this.

Related Stories:

• Google New: Find Google’s Latest Releases At One Web Page
• Map Of Google’s Products
• Google Services Go Down For Many
• Google Continues Testing Top Of Page Services Links

Google: The Biggest Network Of Sites

The chart below, provided to us from comScore, shows the number of unique visitors that went to each company’s network of web sites over the past year:

comScore gets its data from a global panel of roughly two million internet users from which it extrapolates findings to the entire online population. This sampling methodology has been much criticized but remains the standard in the industry.

The visitors that comScore counts aren’t the same as the active visitor numbers that Facebook self-reports (see Has Facebook’s Active User Growth Dropped 25% to 50%? for more on that), but the numbers do seem to be close to Facebook’s own statistics.

Facebook: Likely The Biggest Single Site

Of course, the Facebook “network” is pretty much Facebook itself. “Google Sites” will include everything from Google’s search engine to YouTube to Google Blogger. On a “what’s the most popular site” basis, Facebook is likely ahead of Google.

Indeed, when we dig a bit deeper we can see this isn’t all about Google search, Gmail and Maps. Much of the time spent on Google sites happens on YouTube. Indeed, if you look at it by country, you see what a huge contributor YouTube is and what a strategic purchase the video site turned out to be for Google.

Facebook: Most Minutes Spent

In terms of total minutes spent and share of minutes (engagement) Facebook is the global leader, followed by Microsoft, Google and Yahoo in that order. What’s interesting is that Yahoo has half the monthly minutes of Google, which appears at first blush to contradict the “95% content 5% search” time-spent argument often made for display advertising.

It recently issued an order that all internet traffic with “.kz” domain names had to be routed through servers within the country. Google isn’t having any of it and said that it would no longer operate Google.kz:

Last month, the Kazakhstan Network Information Centre notified us of an order issued by the Ministry of Communications and Information in Kazakhstan that requires all .kz domain names, such as google.kz, to operate on physical servers within the borders of that country . . . If we were to operate google.kz only via servers located inside Kazakhstan, we would be helping to create a fractured Internet. So we have decided to redirect users that visit google.kz to google.com in Kazakh.

Google could also simply redirect people to Google.ru given that more Kazakh citizens speak Russian than the official language of the country Kazakh.

As more authoritarian governments look around the world and see the “destabilizing” role the internet has played in the “Arab spring” and other democratic political uprisings, more will seek to assert control in one form or another over online content and communication or organizing tools available to their citizenry. China is Google’s most visible and formidable opponent on the matter of free speech online.

Google publishes a “censorship map” (transparency report) that reflects and logs official requests for removal of information from Google’s index in that country. Ironically Kazakhstan has only 10 requests vs. more  than 4,000 from the US during the same period.

The highlights below are roughly listed in the order they came up during the interview, rather being in order of what I think are most important. Anything quoted is the quote as best I caught it. These all come from my full live blogging of the event. See also coverage from others on Techmeme.

Any typos, I’ll catch later. Right now, I need to seek out food.

1) The Gang Of Four & Platforms

Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook are what Schmidt considers the “Gang Of Four” major companies that have huge “platforms” and dominance in their spaces that is difficult for others to challenge.

Amazon rules in shopping; Apple for “beautiful products.” Google rules in information; Facebook in friends and identity.

Microsoft? Not on the list, as Schmidt doesn’t see it driving evolution of consumer products and services. He did later say it was very strong in the enterprise space, with products being a “flywheel that will power Microsoft for decades.”

Sounds familiar to me See our past post (complete with illustrations): Meet The New Borg: Google, Facebook & Apple.

2) Renewed Deal With Apple On Search & Maps

Google is the default search engine for Apple computers and iOS devices (iPhone and iPad). Google Maps also gets featured placement. That’s going to continue.

“We have a very,very good search partnership” and map relationship with Apple, Schmidt said, saying that deals on both have been renewed. No other details — but just getting a renewal confirmed is huge, since Google and Apple have typically not mentioned much about their deals at all.

Then again, Schmidt said last September that Google and Apple renewed their search deal. So is he talking about the same deal? Which is kind of older now?

3) Google Will Get Social Data In Alternative Ways

Schmidt said repeatedly that it would be “useful” to get social data from Facebook or elsewhere to improve its own products: “From Google’s perspective, it would be useful to have the information; it would make our products better.”

Later, when asked if Google might need to buy Twitter or some other company, he said:

“Our social strategy does not acquire the acquisition of any company, because we can get people to give us that information.”

4) Schmidt’s New Role Is Externally Focused

Schmidt said that he’s dealing with external issues almost exclusively now, while Larry Page — who took over at CEO in April — is focused on products. Sergey Brin is effectively in charge of security and skunkworks.

Isn’t dealing with external issues what Schmidt was already doing before, Swisher asked? “I did about half of that, and it was untenable”

In short, he’s got more time to do external stuff — and don’t expect Page to be on a stage or doing much of an external role any time soon, it seems.

5) Sorry, Steve Jobs, Android Isn’t A “Pocket Probe”

Apparently Apple’s Steve Jobs had been on at Swisher to do more writing about Google and privacy, saying that Android is a “probe in your picket.” That Apple could suck back into too, Jobs said, but it doesn’t have a search engine to process it.

“We don’t do that. We don’t suck the mobile information into search,” Schmidt said. Some anonymous information does go back, but it is “never used against search.”

That’s not true, however. Google will determine a phone’s location — if a user allows — and will use that to create search results that are more personalized. It will also detect that you’re using a mobile device and tailor results that way.

6) Schmidt Will Stay At Google Until He Dies … Or Longer

Schmidt refused to comment on whether he was in the running for or wanted the US Commerce Secretary position that was just filled. He said he was happy at Google, with no plans to leave.

Swisher joked, “Until you die,” prompting Schmidt to joke, “I’d say after death if they could put the coffin” and getting cut off by laughter and another comment before he could finish saying some place at Google.

In short, officially, Schmidt not going anywhere any time soon.

7) Facial Recognition Is The Only Product Google Has Withheld

Google has facial recognition technology, but it’s uncomfortable with how it might be used, so it has withheld it. That’s apparently pretty unique for Google.

“As far as I know, it’s the only technology that Google built and stopped,” Schmidt said.

8) Failing At Social Was Worst Thing He Did As CEO

“What do you wish you hadn’t done as CEO at Google,” Swisher asked — or something very close to it.

Earlier, Schmidt had suggested Facebook wasn’t a social success but an “identity” success — a way for “disambiguating identity” on the internet. And that he wished Google had done that.

“Four years ago, I wrote memos on identity and did nothing …. I clearly knew I had to do something, and I failed to do it,” Schmidt said.

When asked why, the answer wasn’t sugarcoated, but it was still alarming. He — and by extension no one at Google in leadership — made the time.

“I think I was busy,” Schmidt said. “CEOs should take responsibility. I screwed up.

9) Personalization Isn’t Ruining Search

Asked about whether personalization is causing a “Balkanized” world where everyone just sees what they want — a theme that’s been popularized recently by Eli Pariser’s book, The Filter Bubble, Schmidt pushed back.

“The differences are pretty small, he said, saying the personalization aspects are a small component of the rankings. “I think that’s a little bit of an overstatement to make a point,” he said.

I still need to get through Pariser’s book (hey, I’m quoted on the first page of it!), but that’s tended to be my view as well.

Personalization is a big deal, a big change, but we’re still not at the point where all your results are so massively personalized that a Republican sees a completely different world view of search results than a Democrat.

10) Bing Beats Google At Direct Answers

For me, the most amazing moment was probably watching the guru of all things tech, Walt Mossberg, beat up on Schmidt about Google’s search results.

Mossberg said he find his Google results “more and more polluted” despite the algorithm reset (the Panda update at the end of February).

Schmidt came back with how the update impacted 12% of search results (which doesn’t mean it improved that many results, but I’ve seen that stat be taken in that way). He said Google makes “hundreds” of improvements each quarter that aren’t seen. And that it is working more to come up with direct answers, rather than links to information.

“If we can come up with the right answers, we’ll just give it to you,” Schmidt said.

That can sound great on the consumer front, but since Google (not to mention Bing) extracts those “direct answers” sometimes from web sites, it opens another can of worms that it is potentially depriving sites of traffic. ‘

For Google, that will play out as further signs of evil in some hands. For Bing, no one will care to attack them on that front, as they’re still too small.

Continuing on, Mossberg said that Bing seems to have more direct answers in some cases.

“There’s that in some narrow cases,” Schmidt said.

There you go — one of the top three execs at Google admitting that Bing beats Google, even if it’s in a narrow case. I’m sure there have been some statements like that before, but they’re few and far between.

It also goes to the fact that many of Bing’s direct answers come from Bing having human intervention to create those answers, something Google has perversely prided itself in not doing. But it may be that to win the direct answer game, Google will have to let go of its “algorithms rule all” mindset.

On the Xooglers blog (and below) is a video of a “TGIF meeting.” Taken in 1999 by Doug Edwards, who was then the director of consumer marketing and brand management for Google, it almost plays like a scene from the NBC show “The Office.”

The video presents a pretty routine employee meeting: announcements are made, some new employees are introduced and an informal birthday party happens. According to Edwards’ blog post the company, then about a year old, had “fewer than 60 employees.”

The sound quality is poor so it’s hard to hear what’s being said. But that’s almost immaterial.

What’s amazing is how young Larry and Sergey look, especially Sergey. There’s a goofy, awkward quality to the whole thing.

Many of the employees in the room seem bored or simply to politely tolerate the meeting. They couldn’t have known at that time how wealthy they would become if they stayed through the IPO five years later.

At 4:25 (of the 7 minute video) there’s a shot of Google SVP Susan Wojcicki with a baby in her arms and, I believe, Salar Kamangar now CEO of YouTube. Others may recognize more faces.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Photo of Larry Page and Sergey Brin from “The TGIF Show” from 1999. Used with permission.