What would April Fools’ Day be without a gag from Google?
This year’s joke explores the search giant’s gaping lack of search data on smells with the beta product Google Nose.
There is a link to information about Google Nose on the Google home page (as shown above) and also at the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs) and off to the side as a suggested search.
“Nose” as an option in the Google results page.
Suggested Smells for Google Nose
On the suggested search results, searchers are also given the option to “Share aroma” — which means post it on your Google+ feed.
Clicking the link to “How it works” takes you to a landing page created with as much care as any other Google product. The page explains how Google nose is expanding Google’s search index with “15M+ scentibytes.” At the bottom of the page is a list of other Google products that will be enhanced by Google Nose:
- Scratch and sniff Google Books
- Food Doodles
- New car smell for the Google self-driving car
- YouTube nosed captions
- AdScent for Business (allowing smellable ads)
Some of these links connect to blog posts on the respective services blogs that tie in to the gag, but others disappointingly just go to the service’s main page. It would have been interesting to see a blog post or press release for each of these other services as well.
Google did go as far as to create a promotional video, though.
With all the possibilities for this new search technology, what would you like to smell?
Leave a Reply