Google Goodies !!

Google is one company that I admire for it's amazing innovative practices... Be it in increasing market share, creating services that we never thought could exist, or simply playing around :)

I'll take the "playing around" bit, coz that seems pretty interesting. Am sure a lot of you might have noticed the Google logo changing looks, when you encounter a global event. The two initial ones that come to my mind are Haloween, and the Football World Cup !! But did you also know that Google plays around with pages on it's site, when we celebrate April Fool's Day ?!?!

Yes... Google celebrates April Fool's in the most innovative manner possible... It'll showcase an entirely different picture of itself, providing something to the audience that would catch attention... Be it introducing a "Google Gulp (A Google 'smart drink')", MentalPlex (A smarter and faster 'search' engine), Google Romance (Your search for love) or G.C.H.E.E.S.E. (Experiments at Google's lunar office). But the one that stands out is Google's PigeonRank service :))

Everyone today knows that Google's PageRank is the technical brain behind better and faster searches at Google. They now created a spoof themselves, and introduced a 'new' technology termed "PigeonRank" !! They claim to rely on the superior trainability of the domestic pigeon and it's unique capacity to recognize objects !! When a search query is submitted to Google, it is routed to a data center, and the results are flashed at blazing speeds. When a pigeon observes a 'relevant' result, it strikes a rubber-coated steel bar with it's beak, which assigns the page a PigeonRank value of one. For every other such peck, the PigeonRank increases by one :)) The pages receiving the most pecks (or with the highest PigeonRank value) are displayed to the user as the "top search result" .. LOL !!

Isn't this amazing !?? Well, you can only expect this from GOOGLE, with the amount of fun they have @ work :) Read more about the record-breaking PigeonRank 'algorithm' here :
1. http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html

And for other April Fool's goodies @ Google...
2. http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html
3. http://www.google.com/googlegulp/
4. http://www.google.com/mentalplex/
5. http://www.google.com/romance/tour.html

P.S. : Thanks Akhil, for enriching me with this wonderful info :)