BANGALORE: Continuing its tradition of coming out with a slew of pranks on April Fools’ Day, Google on Sunday, released a video which announced the launch of its Google Maps service for NES, a video game.
According to Google, the version is an 8Bit software with voice input feature. The prank was followed by adding an extra layer to the Google Maps website called ‘Quest’ which features 8Bit tile graphics of yesteryear. Similarly, on YouTube, ‘YouTube Collection’ which claimed to be a compilation of all YouTube data was made available for the user on DVD, which turned out to be another hoax. At the bottom of the website, a fake shipping form which after being filled, gave a delivery date of June 16, 2045 along with small grey text saying ‘Also, April Fool.’ “It is a very good collection of pranks this year. They convinced me with the Google Racing prank,” said Kaushik, an IT professional. The Google Racing prank features a link on the regular google page which takes customer into to a snazzy looking web page announcing a partnership with NASCAR to help create self-driving vehicles which would then compete in stock car racing. Google also changed its ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button to ‘I’m steering lucky’ on the day.
All of these pranks, however ,could be accessed only through google.com central website and not localised google.co.in website. “Why can’t the Indian website have all of these pranks. They are present here in India, they should have introduced the pranks here as well,” demanded Trisha, who bypassed the country website and checked all the pranks on google.com website.