April Fools Pranks You May Have Missed from Google’s Asia Offices

I’m not a big fan of April Fools Day on the internet [1]. There were more than a few online pranks that were less than impressive this year. But perhaps no one put more effort into their pranks more than Google this year. There was full run-down over one of the Google blogs on March 31, perhaps a warning for anyone who might take them too seriously on the following day [2]. Besides the 8-bit Google Maps, there were a couple of other gems from Google’s Asian offices that you might not have seen.

Complementing the Gmail tap morse code prank, the folks at Google Japan created a video showing a morse code version of the Japanese IME. The idea is that it lets you input Japanese characters using a corresponding sequence of dots and dashes. You can check out the video below for more info on how it works. Or rather, how it would work if it were real. It’s in Japanese, but it has English captions:

As for Google China (yes, they’re still there), they created a very unusual underwater image search page which is pretty amusing. Upon visiting their shuixia page (google.cn/landing/shuixia/), you get a warning that the following page is just an April Fool’s joke, and to click through if you’d like to continue. The Google search bar then falls into the water to swim with the fishes [3]. And even though the tide sweeps the search bar away, you can still search for images on there.

I Googled ‘life preserver’ which prompted some images to drop from the sky, but regrettably they sank to the bottom.

Google looks to be staying afloat though. But I could have sworn I saw a Baidu logo on one of those sharks…