Google cancels its yearly tradition of posting an April Fools’ Day joke ‘out of respect for all those fighting the COVID-19 pandemic’
- Google skipped its tradition of posting an elaborate April Fools’ Day joke
- The decision was made by the company’s chief marketing officer
- The company says it wants to show respect to people working to fight COVID-19
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Google is skipping its tradition of designing an April Fools’ Day joke on its front page during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The announcement came from Lorraine Twohill, Google’s chief marketing officer, who informed company management of the decision in an email.
According to Twohill, the decision was made ‘out of respect’ for everyone currently working to fight against the spread of COVID-19.
Google will forgo its annual tradition of posting an April Fools’ Day joke for the first time since the tradition began in 2000, a decision the company says was made ‘out of respect for all those fighting the Covid-19 pandemic’
‘Under normal circumstances, April Fool’s is a Google tradition and a time to celebrate what makes us an unconventional company,’ Twohill wrote, according to a Business Insider report.
‘This year, we’re going to take the year off from that tradition out of respect for all those fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. Our highest goal right now is to be helpful to people, so let’s save the jokes for next April, which will undoubtedly be a whole lot brighter than this one.
‘We’ve already stopped any centralized April Fool’s efforts but realize there may be smaller projects within teams that we don’t know about. Please suss out those efforts and make sure your teams pause on any jokes they may have planned — internally or externally.’
Google first began posting April Fools’ Day jokes in 2000, when it added a new fictional search option to its home page, called MentalPlex.
The new ‘smarter and faster’ search method asked for users to stare into a red and blue circular swirl and ‘project [a] mental image of what you want to find.’
In 2017, Google announced Google Gnome, a joke version of its Google Home AI assistant that was housed inside the shell of a garden gnome
Another April Fools’ Day joke involved the announcement of Google Wind, a fake tech initiative the company said would use windmills to blow clouds out of the sky and ensure every day was bright and sunny
Google once revamped its Google Maps layout in the style of Pac-Man, which would let users play the famous arcade game in a grid based on whatever city they were searching for directions in
Over the years, the company has made its April Fools’ jokes ever more elaborate.
In 2017, the company issued a joke announcement of Google Gnome, a version of its home assistant Google Home housed in a garden gnome shell.
The company once revamped Google Maps to appear as if it was a giant Pac-Man level, complete with pellets and roving ghosts.
Google Japan once unveiled a fictional ‘keyless keyboard’ that was just an inflatable party horn that would send a wireless signal to a computer corresponding to a letter on a keyboard based on how hard its user blew on it.
Another year, the company announced ‘Google Wind’ a network of machine learning windmills capable of blowing clouds out of the sky to make sure every day was bright and sunny.