Googlified

Google has tons of pranks for this year’s April Fool’s Day, including Gmail Custom Time, Virgle: The Adventure of Many Lifetimes, Google Wake Up Kit, and more!

• Gmail Custom Time: It enables you to send email back until April 1, 2004.
• Google Human Search (Chinese): searches 250 million volunteers by their personal characteristics.
• Virgle: Virgin and Google team up together to create Project Virgle to build a second Earth on Mars - just in case Earth gives up on us - in the next 100 years.
• Google Wake Up Kit - The kit from Google Calendar is designed to wake you up by whatever means possible - including “a bed-flipping device … for forceful removal from your sleeping quarters.” Google Calendar also added a “I’m Feeling Lucky” button that sets you up for dates with celebrities.
• gDay - Brought to you by the Google Australia team, it let’s you to search contents on the Internet even before it’s created! - “Hi guys, I am from the future.”
• Scratch-and-sniff books - Google Books is “now able to capture some of the smells during the scanning process” and you can smell them in the preview pages!
• Greener Google Talk: To reduce the amount carbon dioxide produced by instant messaging, Google Talk will now shorten the number of characters used in a IM message by “abbreviating words and dropping vowels” - the so-called IM-speak.
• Google Dajare (Japanese): The mission of this project is “to organize the world’s laughter, (allow) people around the world (to) have access to what(ever) they want.”
• YTRickRollsYou - “We’re no strangers to love, You know the rules and so do I … Never gonna give you up, Never gonna let you down … We’ve know each other for so long” - click on any feature videos on YouTube (no, this is not rickroll).
• Google Cash (Russian) - Now you can install the Google Cash portable right from your office or home and make payments for advertising cash roubles - designed exclusively for Russian AdWords users. (I thought the machine is designed to print money to pay for the users’ online advertising campaigns…)
• Yogurt: the new Orkut!
• Google Docs Airplane: Stop typing the boring documents, fold an airplane instead! Go to Google Docs and create a “New airlane!“
• Google Weblogs - New service from Blogger that “Publish text to the web in reverse chronological order.” OMG, this is going to be SO COOL!
• AdSense for Conversation: AdSense will display ads that are relevant to the conversations that you engage in on a headgear that Google provides for you to wear. Also AdSense for Phone Calls (Portuguese).
• FrankRank: a new AdWords ranking algorithm inspired by Frank the hand turkey.

Happy April Fool’s Day everyone! :)

Several websites, including Global Voices, CNet Asia, and Shanghaiist report that YouTube is currently blocked in China, possibly due to the (chaotic) situation in Tibet right now.

[via BoingBoing]

Last October, Google China launched G.cn (which redirects to Google.cn), one of the shortest domain names on the web. To promote this new address, Google China partnered with several Chinese video sharing sites and started an online video challenge in November, and the winners were announced on January 6th.

I am not going to comment on this first place winning video, but I will say that there aren’t a lot of entries submitted and the judges have to pick out something.

[via GSeeker]

Google China is testing a new home page which, unlike the current minimalist design, filled with many links. The section under the searching field lists some of the most searched queries in different topics such as music, game, sport and education. The sidebar contains links to “useful tools”, which includes Google’s Pinyin IME and Toolbar, Internet speed test (FTW? I know people still do it, but err…), and a calendar. It wasn’t all that bad until you reach the bottom of the page, which contains a HUGE list of links to other sites, from Google Daohang - Google China’s website directory.

It kinda reminds me the first time I have access to the world wide web. Wasn’t that long ago anyways, like 6 or 7 years. Another thing worth mentioning that I was still living in China at the time. :P

[via Google Blogoscoped]

The 2008 Summer Olympics‘ opening ceremony will be held exactly 1 year from now (366 days, next year is a leap year) in Beijing and Google China is celebrating this special day with the weird looking Google Doodle.

The Google logo is overlapped by 2008 (took me well over 2 mins to notice that). This logo is the first doodle to include the Google’s Chinese name “Guge”, as pointed out by the Official Google China Blog.

Also see: Russia Winter Olympics 2014

Another new blog from Google, Google China Webmaster Blog. This time it’s a bit different though. Not only that it has its own domain, it’s running on WordPress!

The goal of the blog is to “provide a communication channel, collect information and improve Google Chinese search”. We will constantly provide updates about Google, delivering our thoughts on Chinese SEO, and answer questions interested by most of you.

Not eating your own dogfood anymore, Google? Or are you trying to imply something big coming? :)

Google yesterday launched a new product in the Google Labs China, called the Google ShengHuo Search, or Google Life Search. The product allows users to search online classified ads and user reviews from China’s websites and from the information their partners provided. Currently, you can only search information about house renting, job opportunities, train tickets, item trades and restaurant.

It’s like Google Base, only that it is in Chinese and users can’t submit products (or anything) through ShengHuo Search. Not yet.

Google China today apologize for stealing rival Sohu’s data for their Pinyin IME that was released a few days ago. The suspicion started when Sohu’s employees discovered that both of the input method editors share a similar thesaurus and have the same bugs.

After threatening of lawsuit, Google comply with Sohu and apologize publicly: [translated by Keith Chan]

We are willing to face up to the problem, and therefore would like to apologize to both our customers and Sohu.

Meanwhile, we immediately took action this week (April 8, 2007) at noon, We have completed the second update (version 1.0.17.0 ) and spent two days to complete the re-escalation of the current thesaurus. Currently, the Google thesaurus comes from the massive searchable database accumulated over the years produced by tens of millions of entries.

You have made a bad move there, Google.

also read: Shareholders To Vote On Google Censorship In China - Search Engine Land

Google Labs China today releases the first version of the Google Pinyin IME (though it is already in version 1.0.15.0).

“The intelligent Google Pinyin IME has five major features”, as listed on its home page:

• Auto sentence creation
• Popular vocabularies
• Synchronize with Google account
• One click search
• English hint (when type in the first characters of a word and it will show a list of words)

Some other features are auto correction, refined vocabulary, traditional Chinese input and GBK support, custom phrases, and you can import/export dictionaries.

Google has been developing this tool since (at least) last year, and has been testing internally since.

[via Google Blogoscoped]

The Google China ReBang is now live.

A little bit different than the last time we seen it, but overall, it’s about the same. One new thing I see is that on the top of the page, it is now displaying “live queries” - actually just a list of pre-fetched recent queries, not live.

There used to be some collapse & expand arrow for the section on the left, but it’s gone now.

Glad to see it, I am hoping for an English version and other International versions.

[via Googling Google]