I did not pull any April Fool’s Day pranks today; in fact, I forgot about it until my econ professor passed out an exam at the beginning of class, which is a week earlier than it is scheduled for. Anyway, as soon as I remembered, I went online to Google’s home page to look for April Fool’s hoax this year. They always post it as a legitimate announcement at 11:59:59 on March 31. Their announcement always looks like it could be real, but once you look at the links attached to the announcement, you quickly realize the hoax.
This year it is CADIE, the Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity. Read Google’s announcement, technical specs, and CADIE’s homepage. Along with CADIE, Google released multiple services supposedly powered by CADIE, the gBall, Gmail auto-pilot, upside-down YouTube videos for a better viewing experience, and more little things which probably have not been found yet.
Last year, it was AdSense for Conversations, and in 2007 it was Gmail Paper (and much more, of course).
Have fun today with your hoaxes, pranks, and jokes!
