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?

If you are logged in while using Google News and your friends or contacts have used the Google +1 button to like the stories in your Spotlight section, that information will show up in the Spotlight section near the article. It will even let you click on the name of your friend/contact to see their social profile on Google.

Google said:

Starting today, the Spotlight section will sometimes include articles that your Gmail contacts and people in your Google+ circles have publicly +1’d. You can see their profile pictures and click through to their Google+ profiles, just like on Social Search. And of course you can +1 the stories too, expressing your opinion and optionally sharing with your circles.

Related Stories:

• Google+ Badge Tool Now Makes Facepile-Style Badges, +1 Counts To Be Consolidated
• Google+ Pages For Businesses: The AdWords Impact
• Google Webmaster Live Help Via Google + Hangouts Tomorrow
• Google’s +1 Button Now Works With Google +, Go Figure!
• How Being “Friends” On Google+ Leads To Better Rankings
• New: Google Now Showing Local +1 Counts
• Confirmed: Google Showing Google +1 Counts To Logged Out Users
• Comparing Facebook Like vs. Google +1

This also means we’re increasingly trusting the companies that provide these services to keep our data and personal information secure. Based on my personal experiences reporting on many companies that offer cloud-services and talking with them about security measures, this trust is generally well-founded.

But what happens if something goes wrong? For example, imagine an extreme case—what if your Gmail account was hacked, and even worse, if the hacker succeeded in deleting all of your email?

This horrific scenario happened recently to Deb Fallows, wife of The Atlantic national correspondent James Fallows. I had the pleasure of spending a few days with both Deb and Jim at a search conference in China several years ago, and can attest that both are technically savvy and not likely to be careless with their online “security hygiene.” So when I came across Jim’s story about Deb’s Gmail account being hacked, I read it—very, very carefully.

People who read Jim know that he’s written about technology for ages, and is one of the sharpest analysts of all things tech (I mean that both in the sense that he has a keen understanding and is also never shy about skewering inferior or faulty products or services). What some people don’t realize, however, is that Jim is also very knowledgeable about search, and Google in particular—for years he’s been a moderator and interviewer at Google’s exclusive Zeitgeist events. To help his wife recover her Gmail account and learn more about how such a catastrophic event could occur in the first place, he went to Google and spoke with people ranging from senior officials who set security policy to the engineers in the trenches who constantly monitor Google for threats and wrangle the systems to thwart the bad guys.

What he learned is eye-opening, but also reassuring. In my mind, his article Hacked is a must-read for anyone who uses Gmail, or any other cloud-based service. It’s a balanced look at the tradeoffs we all must make between enjoying the convenience of working in the cloud vs. the security risks we take—despite the serious and comprehensive measures companies like Google take to keep our data secure. A few interesting passages from the article:

“My wife’s password was judged as “strong” when she first chose it for use with Gmail. But it was a combination of two short English words followed by numbers, so if it didn’t leak from some other site, it might just have been guessed in a brute-force attack. For reasons too complex to explain here, even some systems, like Gmail’s, that don’t allow intruders to make millions of random guesses at a password can still be vulnerable to brute-force attacks.”

“At Google I asked Byrant Gehring, of Gmail’s consumer-operations team, how often attacks occur. “Probably in the low thousands,” he said. “Per month?,” I asked. “No, per day,” followed by the reassurance that most were short-lived “hijackings,” used to send spam and phishing messages, and caused little or no damage, unlike our full-out attack.”

“Against this assault, the Google security team, like its counterparts at other companies, is constantly monitoring activity across its systems, toward the end of detecting break-ins and hijacks before damage has been done, and even before the owners know that something has gone wrong.”

To its credit, Google was able to retrieve and restore Deb Fallows’ deleted emails. This wasn’t necessarily preferential treatment because of Jim’s contacts within Google—Google has an official “Undeletion Project” to assist people who’ve had their accounts hacked. Last month, Google also began offering a live help line for email recovery.

Fallows ends his article with some practical tips on protecting your cloud-based data. He followed up yesterday with a Q&A style blog post offering specific recommendations for making your Gmail account more secure. As said, both of these should be must-reads for anyone using Gmail or other cloud-based services:

• Hacked!
• Quick Points on Gmail Security

Both Jim and Deb are prolific bloggers, and well worth following for the wide-ranging and interesting stories they write:

• James Fallows
• Deb Fallows

Suspected state-sponsored Gmail hacking is what initially caused Google to discontinue cooperating with China’s internet censorship policies.

Chinese: Google Is a “Political Tool”

Last week’s hacking incident  and Google’s statements that indirectly point to the government as the source have the Chinese seeing red, so to speak. Claiming that China is being unfairly maligned, the Chinese are warning (though official publications of the Communist Party) that they may seek to punish or retaliate against Google in some way.

The Chinese government has consistently and angrily denied any involvement in Gmail hacking incidents. And it has never been entirely proven that the government was directly or indirectly involved. However Wikileaks documents (together with third party security analysis) strongly implicate (if not confirm) the hacking was carried out by the Chinese government or its surrogates.

Experts: Hacking Part of a Sustained Espionage Campaign

China says that Google’s implied accusations are “deliberately pandering to negative Western perceptions of China” and that Google has become a “political tool.” However Chinese Gmail hacking is reportedly part of a long-standing campaign by “cyberspies” in China to gain access to US defense and corporate information.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

James Mulvenon, a China and cyber-security expert, has been tracking a four-year phishing campaign against China specialists in Washington. He’s logged more than 100 rounds of attacks against 30-40 China specialists, many of whom have rotated in and out of government . . . The goal of this campaign in Washington appears to be to gather information from individuals who communicate with U.S. officials about China matters, Mr. Mulvenon said.If cyberspies gather sensitive but unclassified data from Washington research institutions and a smattering of U.S. officials, he said, “you get a pretty good picture of what’s going on in Washington as it relates to China.”

A New Cold War

Welcome to the new Cold War. Going forward it appears that the US and China will seek to maintain cordial relations publicly — China is the largest US debt holder and the US is a critical market for Chinese-made goods — while conducting computer-based espionage and counter-espionage operations against each other behind the scenes.

Related Entries

• Chinese Hacking Google Again To Stop “Jasmine Revolution”
• Wikileaks: Chinese Leaders’ Vanity Searches On Google Led To Hacking
• Baidu Squeezing Google Out On Chinese Android Phones
• China Renews Google License To Operate In China
• Google Stops Censoring In China, Hopes Using New Domain Meets Legal Requirements
• How Google Could Have Bought Baidu And Other Fascinating Details About China’s Largest Search Engine
• Google Just Says No To China: Ending Censorship, Due To Gmail Attack
• Google Can’t Seem to Quit China
• Google’s New China Plan: Target Display Advertisers, Report Says

Not only that, Twitter added a neat “Shuffle” feature to randomly jump to other Twitter user’s timelines by clicking on the top right shuffle icon on that page:

Meanwhile, Google announced the people widget for Gmail yesterday. That feature allows you to learn more about the people you are about to send off an email to within Gmail. Google said this people widget helps surface “content from friends, family and colleagues that is already available to you but may be hard to find and makes it easier to connect with them.” This is rolling out over the next couple weeks to all Gmail users.

Here are some screen shots:

The system will use Gmail user’s habits — whether they read messages quickly or mark them as unimportant, for example — to determine whether the topics covered by the emails are of interest. For example, if a user opens every message related to cast-iron cookware, but sends to spam or deletes everything that references gardening supplies, they’ll soon see more ads about the cookware and none about garden trowels. Users can opt-out in their settings, if they’d prefer not to see these more personalized ads.

Additionally, Google says it’s testing serving offers and coupons from local businesses to Gmail users. Though the company didn’t elaborate, the new ads are likely to be associated with its Offer Ads, which let advertisers add coupons directly to their sponsored search listings. They could also be related to the company’s Groupon clone, Google Offers.

The effort is a part of Google’s attempts to make ads in Gmail more relevant and effective. The company has already cut down the number of ads in the application by more than a third, and hopes that the personalization also increases responses.

Only a few Gmail users will see the new ads now, but the company expects to roll them out to more users over time.

Hat tip to Google Operating System for originally reporting the news.

There are a very limited number of search commands that currently work in Google Talk Guru. As you can see from the screenshot above, searches for international times aren’t supported (#1 and #2 above), but weather search (#3) and even a simple web search (#4) are. The web search is kinda like the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button on Google.com — it returns only the first result for your search query and an option to see the second result by replying with “next.”

It’s somewhat reminiscent of Aardvark, the Q&A service that Google bought in February 2010, which offers a sort-of “social search” via instant message (and other platforms).

Google Talk Guru currently supports seven search commands.

(via Google Operating System)

Ever vigilant against democratic reforms, the Chinese government has more successfully cracked down on the popular expression of discontent than the regimes of the Middle East. For example the word “jasmine” has reportedly been blocked by Chinese authorities on social networking sites.

Now Google is blaming the Chinese government for “politically motivated attacks” that have recently disrupted GMail service for some Chinese users. Reportedly the Chinese are going after activists thought to be behind the attempted protests.

According to The Guardian:

Chinese customers and advertisers have increasingly been complaining about their Gmail service in the past month  . . . “Relating to Google there is no issue on our side. We have checked extensively. This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail,” said a Google spokesman.

The announcement follows a blog posting from Google on 11 March in which the firm said it had “noticed some highly targeted and apparently politically motivated attacks against our users. We believe activists may have been a specific target.” The posting said the attacks were targeting a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser. The two firms have been working to address the issue. At the time, Google declined to elaborate on which activists had been targeted or where the attacks had been coming from.

The involvement of the Chinese government and/or its surrogates in the GMail hacking episode that prompted the partial exit of Google from China was confirmed by Wikileaks documents last year.

However, in a bit of revisionist history, Google’s Daniel Alegre, president, Japan and Asia-Pacific operations, tells the Wall Street Journal that “Google never left China”:

I think there is a misconception of whether Google is returning to China. Google never left China. We continue to service our customers as well as our advertisers. There are very large opportunities not only in terms of search but export as well.

In the Q&A interview Alegre discusses Japan, Android other aspects of Google’s strategy and operations throughout Asia.

Postscript by Barry Schwartz: BBC reports that China deny’s Google’s claim of email hacking. “This is an unacceptable accusation,” ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told a regular news conference on Tuesday.

(Image via Shutterstock)

Related Entries

• China Renews Google License To Operate In China
• Impact Of Leaving China? Google Loses Paid Search Share
• Google Stops Censoring In China, Hopes Using New Domain Meets Legal Requirements
• How Google Could Have Bought Baidu And Other Fascinating Details About China’s Largest Search Engine
• Google Looks To Shutter China Search Operation As Talks With Government Reach “An Impasse”
• Can Google Stay In China And Still Save Face?
• Google Just Says No To China: Ending Censorship, Due To Gmail Attack

Image ads have made their way into paid search on Google.com and various other properties on Google. But this was really jarring for me to encounter. It’s the only such ad I saw (next to an email from a clothing retailer in my inbox) after purposely looking for others.

I’m sure it’s a test to see how users react and what the response rates are. Gmail is formally a part of the “Google Display Network“:

Your text, image, rich media, and video ads can appear across YouTube, Google properties such as Google Finance, Gmail, Google Maps, Blogger, as well as over one million Web, video, gaming, and mobile display partners.

I’m not sure how long this test has been running; it’s the first time I’ve seen it and I use Gmail as my primary email address.

Postscript: A Google spokesperson provided the following comment:

We’re always trying out new ad formats and placements in Gmail, and we  recently started experimenting with image ads on messages with heavy image content.

Related posts:

• Google Image Search Now With Leaderboard Ads
• Google Advertising Google Image Ads With Image Ad
• Google Revamps Image Search, Debuts Expanded Image Search Ads

The government said the following in its press release about the rationale:

The contract provides for an easily accessible suite of services, including e-mail and collaboration tools, to facilitate a more mobile work force.  While agencies have moved sub-entities’ e-mails to the cloud, GSA is the first to utilize a cloud-based system for e-mail agencywide.  The migration will result in a 50 percent savings over the next five years when compared to current staff, infrastructure, and contract support costs. GSA’s move to cloud-based e-mail and collaboration tools is part of a government-wide effort to utilize more agile, lightweight technology such as cloud computing and to shared services to limit the need for expensive, redundant infrastructure.

Google said that earlier this year its Apps platform “became the first suite of cloud computing email and collaboration applications to receive Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification, enabling agencies to compare the security features of Google Apps to that of existing systems.”

Not all government agencies are equally forward thinking and sometimes they need a little nudge. Google is providing that to the Department of the Interior in the form of a lawsuit for not considering Google Apps and only considering Microsoft software in a recent agency procurement round for its 88,000 employees.

One might wonder about security of government data in The Cloud. But human error probably remains a greater threat than the security of the involved systems. In November a GSA employee “accidentally” sent the names and Social Security numbers of all 12,000 of the agency’s employees to a third party email address, exposing them to potential identity theft.

Thanks to Gary Price for alerting us to this item.