It’s not real. But I sure wish it were, Google going all Kanye West on people searching for Taylor Swift.

In the mockup above you can see Google responding “I’m really happy for you, and I’m gonna let you finish your search, but did you mean: beyonce” instead of the usual “Did You Mean” spelling correction.

The mockup is from the I Am Bored site, which I found via this discussion by Jess Lee on FriendFeed. And while that might entirely fictional (trust me, it is — I’ve tried to reproduce it in various ways. Not. Real.), Yahoo kind of goes all Kanye on its competitors in real life.

Search for Google on Yahoo, and you get this:

Search for Bing, and you get this:

In both cases, Yahoo puts up a box to let you search through Yahoo rather than going directly to its competitors. It’s gonna let you finish going to them, but first….

Kanye’s actually following in Yahoo’s footsteps. Yahoo’s been interrupting searches like this for ages.

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.

Mike Blumenthal has detailed on his blog how Google is now letting business owners provide the address information that’s mapped when a “plus box” is opened in search results associated with their listings. Previously Google determined what address/mapping data to show in the plus box, which resulted in errors on many occasions according to Mike.

The move is part of Google’s larger effort to let business owners and the community in general take more control of Maps data and listings in an effort to improve their accuracy and quality.

Postscript: Mike caught us out! It was an April Fool’s joke, as it turns out.

Microsoft executives, worried that the plan to acquire Yahoo for an estimated $40 billion might not happen, have hatched an alternative plan that might bring about success over Google at a much cheaper cost. To win in search, Microsoft may pay people not to use Google. And pay a premium, up to $1 million per year, over the next three years, to anyone within the United States.

Called the "$1 Million Guarantee Program," the initiative will reward anyone within the United States that agrees to have web surfing monitoring software hooked to their computer. To allay privacy concerns, the software will watch for only one thing — use of Google and other non-Microsoft search engines.

Under the program, people can earn up to $1 million per year if they exclusively use Microsoft’s search products. The program is open to any US resident aged 6 and above. There will be some provisions for "accidental" or "occasional" visits to non-Microsoft services. But by and large, the deal is that by being exclusive to Microsoft, Microsoft will reward users with cold hard cash.

Absurdly expensive? It can seem that way at first, but consider the math. There’s an estimated 300 million people living in the United States. If you pay each one $1 million for the next three years, that’s just under $1 billion. That saves Microsoft $39 billion compared to what it was going to spend on purchasing Yahoo.

The US isn’t the limit for Microsoft rebels behind the plan. The world population is just under 7 billion. Give each person $1 million for three years and that’s still only half the price of purchasing Yahoo. However, Microsoft figures that it could use a sliding scale for some countries. Where the cost of living is less expensive, less would be given out. And places where the US dollar is not longer worth as much (Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union …. it’s a long list), slightly more might be given.

The main reason Microsoft plans to start with the US are the legalities. So far, they can’t find any US law that would prevent them from paying for exclusivity in this way. Technically, they aren’t paying for people NOT to use Google. They’re paying for people to be loyal to Microsoft, which would seem to clear some regulatory hurdles. After the US, they would examine issues with other major markets.

So far, there’s no reaction from the Google side. Google’s issue is that it has far less cash on hand to use to bribe people for loyalty. Instead, Google’s been relying on simply giving products away, such as Google Docs that just gained offline access today (and see here). But with cold hard cash being offered by Microsoft, especially during a time of economic turmoil, Google might face the most serious challenge in its history.

Microsoft’s plans are still a work in progress and yet to be approved. If they are, the hope is that the program will be formally unveiled a year from today, April 1, 2009.

Postscript: Of course, one fatal flaw in this plan. The math makes no sense at all. At $1 million per person for even one year, it’s like $300,000,000,000,000. I don’t even know what you call that. $300 trillion? Just $10 per person for one year would be like $3 billion. If I’m doing the math right. And I’m probably not. Did I mention being an English major?

A reader spotted a pretty strange story in the Google News Sci/Tech area. Mixed alongside stories about AskEraser, the Space Shuttle launch, and “w00t” being crowned as word of the year was a recipe for Grasshopper Chocolate Chunk Cookies, the lead item for a cluster of Christmas cookie stories.

To see a full size screen capture of the page shown in the screenshot above, click here.

This comes after Google just announced that their news algorithms are supposed to be more relevant and fresh.

Here’s latest Google Universal Search funny, this time for chewing gum. Three images at the top. You’ve got your gumballs, your Juicy Fruit, and your — um – naked woman? Yep:

You can’t really see that much, so I haven’t bothered to place a strategic black dot. Those concerned that this might have come up in front of a classroom of kids will be happy to know that if Google SafeSearch is on, then none of the images show. This is because it appears that SafeSearch overrides Google Universal Search image integration, regardless if a picture is explicit or not.

I say this because if you do an image search for chewing gum with SafeSearch in the "moderate" setting, which should filter out any explicit images, the woman still appears in the top results. Thus, Google doesn’t consider the picture explicit.

It’s only if you use the "strict" setting, which removes content based on the words on pages, that the picture disappears. And if you go to the page this picture appears on, which lets you watch the Danish chewing gum commercial it’s from, you can see words like "naked" and "penis" that probably trigger the strict filtering.

See also Google Universal Search Means Looking For Raccoons Is No Longer Family Friendly for our last funny like this.

A reader tipped me off to this. Search for raccoon, and Google Universal Search puts some pictures up at the top of the page:

See it? Third one over? I didn’t know a dog and a raccoon could, well…

To be fair, Microsoft Live does the same thing:

Yahoo also shows the happy couple, but only if you specifically do an image search. Ask doesn’t, clearly exhibiting a bias against raccoon-dog love.

Have a good weekend, everyone :)

I love search engines. I love comedy movies. So let’s have fun putting the two together. Which search engines are most like some famous movie fraternities? Yes, there is an Animal House of search!

Google: Lambda Lambda Lambda (Revenge Of The Nerds)

As I pondered how to match search engines to movie fraternities, this one was easy. How could Google not be like the nerds that joined Lambda Lambda Lambda in Revenge Of The Nerds. Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin literally shopped their technology around to all the other search engines back in the late 90s, only to get rejected. So they went out on their own, and the nerds won the show. "Those nerds are a thread to our way of life!"

That’s Larry & Sergey up top, by the way — with Bill Gates, Terry Semel and Jim Lanzone down below, in that order (don’t worry, Jim — you get your own back further below).

Yahoo: Lambda Epsilon Omega (Old School)

With Yahoo, the right match-up eventually came to me: Lambda Epsilon Omega from Old School. That’s the fraternity started-up by three friends who decide it would be cool to party again like they did in their college days. Yahoo was the rocking search fraternity of the past, until Google came along and stole the thunder. So why not go back to the good old days? Heck, one of Yahoo’s founders Jerry Yang is even back at the helm!

Pictured is Susan Decker, then Jerry Yang and search czar Jeffrey Weiner (who was recently interviewed here, by the way)

Microsoft: ROTC

I struggled and struggled to find the right movie fraternity to match Microsoft. I even discovered that Wikipedia maintains a list of fictional movie fraternities and sororities and scanned that for ideas. In the end, I decided that Microsoft has been most like ROTC, the college-based military officer training program.

In both Animal House and Revenge Of The Nerds, you see those in ROTC somewhat interacting with the fraternities. It’s like they’re sort of a fraternity but not quite there. Microsoft, of course, has embarked on a journey to be the leading search destination on the web. But it remains new to the challenge, saddled with still trying to find its own identity (Microsoft MSN Windows Live Search) and so like ROTC, isn’t quite the same as the search engines (IE fraternities) that it’s going up against.

You got a better match-up for Microsoft? Let me know in the comments below!

Ask.com: Delta Tau Chi (Animal House)

The match-up for Ask.com was easy. Indeed, Ask.com CEO Jim Lanzone is a former fraternity member who inspired this entire post. Jim’s a fun guy who enjoys a good prank and treats Ask not just as a job but almost like a fraternity itself, where he looks out for his other members, the fraternity’s reputation and wants to attract new members.

Ask generally has the tiniest share of any of the major search engines, in terms of search traffic — yet it is substantial enough for Ask to still be counted among the majors. And when many have assumed over the years that Ask should be squeezed out by the fight between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, you can almost picture Jim — like John Belushi in Animal House — rallying his Delta brothers and sisters that "nothing is over until we decide it is!"

Yes, Ask is the Animal House of search — and Ask3D is like Jim Lanzone driving the Deathmobile through the parade of the other search engines.

Oh, that’s Jim in the main picture, with Apostolos Gerasoulis in the O and some dude that used to work for Ask when it was Ask Jeeves in the M.

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I had lunch with Ask CEO Jim Lanzone last Thursday when he was here in the UK, and I’ve been itching to tell the news he gave me under embargo. Now it’s up, with Jim himself sharing the announcement in video. Kevin Federline’s Search With Kevin service is being acquired and merged with Ask, to create Ask Kevin. Federline’s also set to head up the new company, with Jim stepping down due to "charisma" factors. Best of luck Jim — welcome, Kevin! Video below:

A Special Announcement from Ask.com on Vimeo

Now posted on the Google Blog, news of the new Google TiSP service offering free wireless to homes via their, ahem, plumbing systems. Sir Thomas Crapper would be proud. See discussion at Techmeme. Google’s latest feature will better connect you with previous Google products that have been rolled out on the first of April: Google Romance in 2006, Google Gulp drinks in 2005, Gmail in 2004 (hey, that was real!) and PigeonRank in 2002. What happened in 2003? Google was very serious in 2003 and unable to release any new products.

TechCrunch (soon to merge with F*kedCompany), also notes that Google’s Gmail service is now pushing Gmail Paper.