Google has unleashed its annual prank on its loyal search fans and for the first time ever, Google users have the option to smell their searches.
This year’s April Fools’ Day funny, the search engine told users that it has a new feature – Google Nose Beta which allows users to catch a waft of a campfire or home-made chocolate chip cookies. Google claims to do this by “intersecting photons with infrasound waves,” so that Google Nose Beta can briefly “align molecules to emulate a particular scent,” according to the YouTube video (a Google entity).
“Google Search is incredibly powerful, and you can search for text across the Internet, most of human knowledge, images, books, videos,” said product manager Jon Wooly, in the YouTube video, “but we realized there was an important part of the search experience we’d overlooked.”
Google pulled double-duty this year, and tricked their users one day early this year, too, announcing the site would shut down at midnight so its 30,000 technicians could have the opportunity to find the best video ever posted on the internet. This would take 10 years, and then the site would re-launch in 2023. They went so far as to create a blog post to ensure the contest looked legitimate.
The world’s most powerful search engine has a history of pulling the wool over its users eyes every year. Previous pranks include “eight-bit version of Google Maps designed for the original Nintendo; Gmail Tap, which utilizes Morse Code; Google Voice for Pets, which allows animals to type and send text messages; and Click-to-Teleport, a Chrome (Google’s browser) feature that lets users teleport to a business location from a search ad,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
“April Fools’ Day is a big part of YouTube’s culture,” a company spokesperson said, according to THR. “Each year, we enjoy finding ways to celebrate our community’s creativity, be it throwing it back to 1911 as we did in 2011 or 2008’s prank of Rickrolling every video on our site.”
Google Nose might not be real, but Google knows that gullible internet users will always be around for April Fools’ Day.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-P6jEMtixY&w=560&h=315]
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H542nLTTbu0&w=560&h=315]
