01 April 2010 | Author: J. Morton News Editor

Web unleashes flurry of April Fool's Day pranks

Depending on your gullibility, it seems either an uplifting or very, very peculiar day for news when searching through internet media outlets.

The most noticeable rib, due to its predominance of the global search market, has been Google's name switch to Topeka on its main page of Google.com. The prank is a turn-around from last month's statement from Topeka, Kansas, mayor Bill Bunten, vying for Google's planned high-speed broadband project, in which he offered to change the name of his city to that of the Mountain View-based search behemoth.

"We didn't reach this decision lightly," the Official Google Blog post read. "After all, we had a fair amount of brand equity tied up in our old name. But the more we surfed around (the former) Topeka's municipal website, the more kinship we felt with this fine city at the edge of the Great Plains."
Across the pond in the UK, the company's British counterpart offered its own series of jokes to hapless web travellers.

First was an extension for its Google translate service for Android, which purported to translate the clucks, meows and barks of our animal friends into human speech, and vice versa.

"To develop Translate for Animals," the application page read, "we worked closely with many of the world's top language synthesis teams, and with leaders in the field of animal cognitive linguistics."
General searches through the Google.co.uk portal also displayed search results in a wide array of increments: Centibeats, Nanocenturies, shakes of a lamb's tail, microweeks and times the velocity of an unladen swallow.

Elsewhere, the Telegraph ran a story about ferrets being employed to deliver high-speed broadband to those in internet 'dead zones' between cities, and alleged that Virgin Media had already been employing the furry creatures.

"For hundreds of years, ferrets have helped humans in various jobs," read a quote attributed to Jon James, director of broadband for Virgin. "Our decision to use them is due to their strong nesting instinct, their long, lean build and inquisitive nature, and for their ability to get down holes."

Internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia used several trickily worded news articles, implying, amongst other things, that Sony Corporation sent employees back in time, and Russian Federation president Dmitri Medvedev successfully shrank the massive Eurasian nation.

Other internet institutions, such as Reddit, Hulu and Funny or Die, also had fun with their websites or news blurbs, as well as traditional news outlets, such as the Guardian.

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