April 1st is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four. (Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894)

Todays I don’t envie all the reporters out there. It’s is April Fool’s Day, and one needs to be on the lookout for what is real news and what is fake news. Here are my 5 favorite April Fools hoaxes from the search industry, starting with Google.


Google Mobile launched Brain Search, which uses their hoax technology CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity) to “index your brain to make your thoughts and memories searchable”. The Big G also mentions some use cases for the new application: you can recall “the name of that guy across the room, where you put your car keys, why you started dating this woman in the first place”. Hehe, hillarious.

Yahoo launched a new search service called Ideological Search. The service allows searchers to “control the ideology of their search results for the first time in search technology history”.

MSN’s Live Search simply redid their homepage. Not a big effort, but still funny.

YouTube turns its videos upside down (add “&flip=1″ to URL to activate.

Reddit looks like Digg for a day.

Bonus (not search, but media related): the British newspaper Guardian announced that it will discontinue its publication after 188 years and publish its news via Twitter. Considering the state of the print media, not such a bad idea, isn’t it?

What were your favorite April Fools hoaxes on the web this year? Let me know in the comments!

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