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 […]

Chat with SearchBot

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:

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:
Live April Fool's Day

And Live Search rebranded as “MSN Windows Live Search on [email protected].”

Others:

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.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.

Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.