Google April Fools Jokes: The Complete History (2000-2019) and Why They Stopped

Google's April Fools' Day jokes ran from 2000 to 2019, starting with MentalPlex, a search box that claimed to read your mind, and growing into dozens of fake products a year, from Google Nose (2013), which promised search by smell, to Pokémon on Google Maps (2014), Pac-Man on Maps (2015), Google Tulip (2019), which claimed to translate tulips, and Snake on Google Maps (2019). Google famously launched the real Gmail on April 1, 2004, with so much free storage that many people thought it was a joke. The tradition had its failures, notably Gmail Mic Drop in 2016, pulled the same day after users sent it by accident. In March 2020, Google canceled its April Fools' jokes because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it has not brought them back as a company-wide tradition since. This page tells the full story, lists the best jokes year by year, and explains how to spot a fake announcement on April 1.

Every April 1, Ethan used to open Google first thing to see what it had invented overnight. His favorite was the year Google Maps hid Pokémon around the world and invited people to become Pokémon Masters; he spent a lunch break finding a Pikachu near the Sydney Opera House. In 2020, he looked and found nothing, and assumed he had missed it. Jake explained that Google had quietly stopped, and had not started again. Ethan asked whether Pokémon Go had come from that joke. It had, more or less. That conversation turned into a list of their favorite Google jokes, the ones that became real, and the one that went badly wrong. This page is that list, expanded into the complete history.

Why Google's April Fools' jokes were famous

Many companies play jokes on April 1, but for nearly two decades Google's were the ones people looked for. There were three reasons. First, they were elaborate: full product pages, help center articles, polished videos with straight-faced engineers, and sometimes working features inside real products, such as a playable game in Google Maps. Second, they were often plausible. Google really was building things that sounded like science fiction, from self-driving cars to glasses with screens, so a fake product could sit right next to a real one and be hard to tell apart. Third, they came from all over the company. Google's teams in the Netherlands, Israel, Japan, Australia and elsewhere made their own, so there were often a dozen jokes in a single year.

The jokes also said something about the company's culture in those years: playful, confident and willing to spend real engineering time on something purely for fun. As Google grew and its products became part of how billions of people work, communicate and get information, that culture faced more risk, which is a large part of why the tradition ended.

The jokes were also a kind of time capsule of each year's technology. Gmail Paper in 2007 mocked the idea of printing email at a time when many offices still did. Fiber to the Pole in 2013 played on the excitement around Google Fiber, which had launched in Kansas City the year before. Dial-up mode in 2015 joked about how quickly fast internet had become normal. Looking back, the jokes trace the history of the internet itself.

Why the best jokes worked

Looking back, Google's most loved jokes had a few things in common. They poked fun at Google itself, its ambitions and its habit of announcing world-changing technology, rather than at users. They took a real product a few steps too far, so the joke made sense to anyone who used it: Gmail on paper, search by smell, Maps as a game board. They were presented completely straight, with diagrams, testimonials and FAQs, which made the absurd details funnier. And the best ones let people join in, like catching Pokémon or playing Pac-Man on their own street, rather than just reading about a fake product.

The weaker jokes tended to be little more than advertisements for a product with a joke attached, and the worst, Mic Drop, broke the rule of not changing real tools people depend on. That combination of self-mockery, plausibility, deadpan presentation and play is why fans still rank the Pokémon Challenge, Pac-Maps, Google Nose and TiSP among the best.

Gmail: the real product launched on April Fools' Day

Google's most famous April 1 announcement was not a joke at all. On April 1, 2004, Google launched Gmail, a free email service with 1 GB of storage per account. At the time, the major free email services offered a few megabytes, roughly enough for a few hundred messages without attachments, and users spent much of their time deleting mail to stay under the limit. A free gigabyte, with Google's search built in so you never had to delete anything, sounded too good to be true on any day, and on April 1 many journalists and readers assumed it was a prank.

Google reportedly chose the date deliberately, enjoying the confusion. The same day, it published a genuine joke, the Google Copernicus Center, a supposed research facility on the moon recruiting staff. Gmail began as an invitation-only service, with invitations so sought after that people sold them online, and it stayed labeled as beta until 2009. It became the world's largest email service, which makes it the most successful April 1 launch in technology history.

The Gmail launch also changed what people expected from free online services. Within a few years, competitors had raised their storage limits dramatically, and generous free storage became normal across email and cloud services, a shift that started on an April Fools' Day.

The early years: 2000 to 2006

Google's first April Fools' joke, in 2000, was MentalPlex. The page asked visitors to remove their hat and glasses, stare at a spinning circle and project a mental image of what they wanted to find. Clicking the circle produced error messages in the same deadpan tone. It set the style for what followed: a joke presented with complete seriousness, complete with an FAQ.

In 2002, Google explained its real ranking technology with PigeonRank, claiming that clusters of pigeons pecked at search results to rank web pages, a parody of the genuine PageRank system. In 2005, Google Gulp was a drink that supposedly optimized your brain for search, and in 2006, Google Romance offered a dating service that matched couples using search technology and suggested Contextual Dating, with ads during dates. These early jokes were mostly single web pages, written by small teams, but they showed Google's habit of mocking its own products and the hype around technology.

The early jokes were also a way for a young company to stand out. In 2000, Google was one of many search engines competing for attention, and a funny, confident April Fools' page got it talked about in a way advertising could not. By the time it was the dominant search engine, the jokes had become an expected annual event.

The golden era: 2007 to 2011

By 2007, the jokes had grown into productions. Gmail Paper offered to print your email and mail it to you on recycled paper, with photos printed on glossy stock and spam excluded. Google TiSP, the Toilet Internet Service Provider, promised free broadband delivered through the sewer system, with a do-it-yourself installation kit. In 2008, Virgle, a joint joke with Richard Branson's Virgin Group, invited applicants to join a human colony on Mars. The same year, YouTube Rickrolled its whole site, turning every featured video into Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up.

In 2009, Google announced CADIE, the Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity, an artificial intelligence that quickly developed a personality, a blog and opinions about Google's products, a joke that looks different now that AI assistants are real. In 2010, Google renamed itself Topeka for the day, returning a favor after the city of Topeka, Kansas, had informally renamed itself Google to attract Google's high-speed fiber network. In 2011, Gmail Motion claimed you could control email with body gestures, such as licking your finger to open a message, with a webcam watching.

YouTube's April Fools' jokes

YouTube, owned by Google since 2006, had its own tradition. The 2008 Rickroll, which turned featured videos on the home page into Rick Astley's song, is the best known, and it helped make Rickrolling a lasting internet joke. In 2010, YouTube offered a TEXTp mode that turned videos into moving ASCII text, claiming it saved bandwidth. In 2013, YouTube's announcement that the whole site had been a contest since 2005, and would shut down that night to begin judging, with a winner to be revealed ten years later, was one of the most shared April Fools' videos ever.

YouTube's jokes worked because they played with what the site was: an endless collection of videos, the culture around them and the internet's own in-jokes. They also, mostly, did not change how people used the site in any lasting way, which kept them on the safe side of the line that Mic Drop crossed.

Maps games and smell search: 2012 to 2015

From 2012, Google Maps became the stage for the most popular jokes, because Maps could turn the joke into something people could actually play. In 2012, Maps offered an 8-bit version styled like a classic Nintendo game, and Gmail Tap replaced the phone keyboard with two buttons for Morse code. In 2013, Google Nose promised search by smell, with an Aroma database of millions of scents; YouTube announced it had been a contest all along and would close that night to pick the best video, to be revealed in 2023; and Google Fiber to the Pole offered gigabit internet from ports on Kansas City utility poles.

In 2014, the Pokémon Challenge in Google Maps hid Pokémon around the world, from landmarks to deserts, and invited users to catch them all and apply to be a Pokémon Master. It was one of the most loved jokes ever, and it had a lasting effect, as the section on jokes that came true explains. The same year, Google Fiber announced Coffee to the Home, delivering made-to-order drinks through the fiber jack. In 2015, Pac-Maps turned real streets into Pac-Man mazes, so you could play Pac-Man on the roads around your home or office, and Google Fiber offered a dial-up mode for people who missed the sound of a 1990s modem.

The regional teams

Many of the best later jokes came from Google's offices outside the United States, which made jokes for their own countries in their own languages. Google Netherlands made Google Wind in 2017 and Google Tulip in 2019, both playing on Dutch symbols. Google's team in Israel made the Hummus API in 2018. Google Japan made a series of Gboard jokes, imagining Japan's keyboard app as strange physical objects, from a giant handwriting board in 2018 to a bendable spoon in 2019. These local jokes often traveled worldwide through YouTube, and some fans preferred them to the headquarters jokes because they were more inventive and less tied to promoting a product.

The regional jokes also showed how far the tradition had spread through the company. By the late 2010s, April 1 involved teams in many countries, each with a script, a video crew and a launch plan, which made the 2020 instruction to cancel everything a significant decision.

Gmail Mic Drop: the joke that went wrong

In 2016, Gmail added a button next to Send called Send + Mic Drop. It sent your email with an animated GIF of a Minion dropping a microphone, and muted the conversation, so you would never see any replies. The problem was where Google put it: right next to the normal Send button, where people clicked out of habit. Users sent the GIF to bosses, clients, job applications and condolence messages, and the muting meant they did not see the confused replies.

Complaints arrived within hours, including people who said they had lost work or embarrassed themselves professionally. Google removed the feature the same day and apologized, saying that a bug had caused more problems than intended and that the joke had backfired. Mic Drop became the clearest lesson in the risks of April Fools' jokes inside real products: a joke that changes how a tool used for work behaves can do real harm, and a company of Google's size cannot predict how millions of people will react.

The episode also showed that a joke's impact depends on context. A GIF that looks funny in a casual email to a friend reads very differently in a message to a manager, a customer or someone grieving, and a product used for all of those cannot assume the joke will land the same way everywhere.

The final years: 2017 to 2019

Google kept going after Mic Drop, but its later jokes were mostly safer, separate from the core of its products. In 2017, Google Gnome was a garden gnome version of the Google Home smart speaker, Google Play for Pets offered apps and games for cats and dogs, and Google Netherlands introduced Google Wind, a system that would use the country's windmills to blow rain clouds away. In 2018, the Google Cloud Hummus API, from Google's team in Israel, promised to analyze your taste and find the perfect hummus, and Google Japan showed a giant physical handwriting version of its Gboard keyboard.

In 2019, the last year of the tradition, Google Maps let users play Snake on city maps around the world, and Google Netherlands introduced Google Tulip, claiming Google's AI could now translate the language of tulips. Google Japan followed its handwriting board with Gboard Spoon Bending, a smart spoon that typed Japanese characters when you bent it, and the Files app gained a fake Screen Cleaner feature that claimed to clean your phone screen with vibrations. These were among the videos our original 2020 post collected as technology people wished were real.

The table lists the best-known jokes, not all of them. In busy years, Google and its regional teams released ten or more, and many lived only on a local blog or in a single product.

Why Google stopped in 2020

In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread and much of the world went into lockdown, Google's marketing chief Lorraine Twohill sent an internal email telling teams to cancel all April Fools' jokes that year. The message said Google would hold off out of respect for everyone fighting the pandemic, and asked teams to stop any jokes already planned, including those from regional offices. Our original April 1, 2020 post noted that disappointment, and collected the past joke videos people still enjoyed.

The cancellation was meant to be for one year, but the tradition never came back as a company-wide event. Google has not explained the decision in detail, but several reasons are often suggested. The Mic Drop incident had shown the risk of jokes inside real products. Concerns about misinformation had grown, and a company that runs a major search engine, YouTube and a news service has more reason than most to avoid publishing things that are deliberately untrue. Google had also become more cautious in general as its size and scrutiny grew. With each year that passed without the jokes, restarting them became less natural.

Other large companies made similar decisions around the same time, either canceling jokes in 2020 or scaling them back permanently. The pandemic was the immediate reason, but it also gave companies a natural moment to drop a tradition that had become harder to justify.

April Fools' Day since 2020

Since 2020, April 1 has been mostly quiet at Google. Some individual products and teams have added small, low-key touches over the years, but nothing like the dozens of announcements and elaborate videos of the 2010s. Other technology companies and brands still publish jokes, so April 1 news is still full of fake products, but the event people once looked forward to most has gone.

The change also reflects a wider shift. Fake but convincing content is now easy to produce with AI image and video tools, and the line between a playful hoax and misleading content feels thinner than it did in 2010. Many companies now prefer to mark April 1 with obvious jokes, or with nothing at all, rather than risk a fake announcement being taken seriously and spreading as fact.

For fans, the result is that the best place to find Google's playful side now is in the archive: the old videos, the Doodles and the easter eggs, rather than in any new announcement each April.

Should Google bring the jokes back?

Fans still ask every year. The case for bringing them back is that they showed a human, playful side of a large company, gave engineers and designers a creative outlet, and delighted millions of people for a day. Several of them led to real ideas. In a period when technology news often feels heavy, a few days of harmless fun could be welcome.

The case against is stronger for a company in Google's position. Its products are used for work, school, health and news by billions of people, and a joke that confuses even a small share of them reaches millions. Fake content is now easy to produce and hard to spot, and a company working on AI safety and fighting misinformation has good reason not to add more deliberate falsehoods to the internet, however playful. The most likely future is the one we have: occasional small, obviously silly touches, and easter eggs that run all year, rather than a return to elaborate fake launches.

Jokes that came true

Several Google jokes turned out to be early versions of real things. The clearest example is the 2014 Pokémon Challenge. It was made with The Pokémon Company and led by Niantic, then a team inside Google, and its success helped inspire Pokémon Go, the location-based game Niantic released in 2016 after becoming an independent company. Pokémon Go became one of the most popular mobile games ever, with players catching Pokémon in real places, exactly the idea of the joke.

Gmail Tap, the 2012 Morse code keyboard, became partly real in 2018 when Google added Morse code input to its Gboard keyboard, designed with a developer who communicates using Morse code, to help people with limited mobility type. Google Translate for Animals, a 2011 joke, has a serious counterpart in research using AI to study animal communication, including Google's 2025 work on DolphinGemma, a model built to analyze dolphin sounds. And CADIE, the 2009 AI with a personality, looks remarkably like the chatbots that arrived more than a decade later; our guides to running Google's Gemma models locally and Gemini 4 Argon show how far real AI has come.

Many other jokes remain jokes. Nobody is searching by smell, tulips are still not talking, and the Netherlands' windmills have not blown the rain away. But the pattern of a joke landing close to something that later became real is part of why people loved them.

Some ideas went the other way, from serious project to something that sounded like a joke. Google's real experiments over the years have included balloons carrying internet access to remote areas, a self-driving car without a steering wheel and glasses with a tiny display, each of which, announced on April 1, might have been taken as a prank.

The videos people still watch

Many of Google's April Fools' videos are still on YouTube, on Google's official channels and those of its regional teams, and they still draw views every April. The ones our 2020 post collected, including Google Tulip, Gboard Spoon, the Google Cloud Hummus API, Google Play for Pets, Google Wind, Google Nose, Coffee to the Home, Google Fiber to the Pole and the Files app Screen Cleaner, are among the most watched. Searching YouTube for the joke's name usually finds the original.

Watching them now is a small time capsule. The videos show Google products as they were, phones and interfaces from the 2010s, and a style of corporate humor that has largely disappeared. They are also a reminder of how convincing a well-made fake can be, which is a useful lesson today.

Our favorites, and why

Ranking the jokes is a matter of taste, but a few stand out for different reasons. The Pokémon Challenge is the best example of a joke people could play, and the one with the biggest real-world legacy. Google Nose is the purest example of the deadpan style, a complete fake product with a straight-faced video, an FAQ and a database of smells, all built around something obviously impossible. TiSP is the funniest on paper, with its toilet installation kit and its promise of free broadband through the sewer. Google Tulip is the most charming, a gentle joke about AI translation that now feels oddly prophetic as AI tools take on more languages each year.

Ethan's top pick remains the Pokémon Challenge, for the Pikachu at the Sydney Opera House. Jake's is Gmail Paper, because he knows people who would still sign up for it. Both agree that Mic Drop is the one nobody misses.

Easter eggs you can still find

Google's sense of fun survives year-round in easter eggs, small hidden surprises in its products. Searching for do a barrel roll spins the results page. Searching for askew tilts it. In Chrome, when you are offline, the error page shows a small dinosaur; press the space bar and it becomes a running game, the Chrome Dino game, which you can also play by visiting chrome://dino. Google's daily Doodles on its home page sometimes include playable games for anniversaries and events.

Easter eggs come and go, and some work only in certain browsers or regions. They are harmless because they do nothing to your data or accounts, which is the difference from the riskier April Fools' jokes built into products like Gmail.

Doodles: Google's year-round fun

The Google Doodle, the changing logo on Google's home page, has carried much of the playfulness that April 1 once did. Doodles mark holidays, anniversaries and notable people, and some are full games. In May 2010, Google marked the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man with a playable Pac-Man Doodle on its home page, one of the first interactive Doodles and so popular that Google gave it a permanent page. Since then, Doodles have included music-making tools, sports games during major tournaments and quiz games.

Doodles differ from April Fools' jokes in a simple way: they are obviously celebrations, not fake announcements, so nobody mistakes them for real product news. Google keeps an archive of past Doodles, including the playable ones, so you can revisit favorites at any time.

Play the Chrome Dino game

1. Open Chrome on a computer or Android phone.
2. Type chrome://dino in the address bar and press Enter, or disconnect from the internet and open any page.
3. Press the space bar or tap the dinosaur to start running.
4. Press space or tap to jump over cacti, and the down arrow to duck under birds.
5. Keep going as the game speeds up; your high score is saved for the session.

The Dino game appeared in Chrome in 2014 and became one of Google's most-played games, partly because people meet it whenever their internet drops. It is the spirit of the old April Fools' jokes in a form that never gets in anyone's way.

How to spot an April Fools' announcement

Even without Google, April 1 brings plenty of fake product announcements from other companies and brands. A few checks separate them from real news:

1. Check the date. If it was published on April 1, in any time zone, be skeptical.
2. Look for the official source. Real launches appear on the company's own newsroom, blog or product page, not just social media.
3. Read the details. Jokes usually include an absurd feature, a pun or a deadpan FAQ that gives the game away.
4. Look for other coverage. Real launches are covered by several established news outlets; jokes are reported as jokes.
5. Wait a day. Most April Fools' announcements are acknowledged as jokes by April 2.

The reverse problem exists too, as Gmail showed: real announcements on April 1 can be mistaken for jokes. Companies now usually avoid launching real products on April 1 for that reason.

AI tools have made convincing fake product photos and videos much easier to produce, which makes these checks more important than they were in Google's heyday. If an image or video of an amazing new gadget appears only on social media, with no official page behind it, treat it as unconfirmed whatever the date.

April Fools' Day and scams

Criminals use April 1 too. Fake giveaways promising free phones, gift cards or subscriptions as a company's April Fools' surprise appear on social media and in email, asking you to click a link, enter your details or pay a small fee. Joke apps and prank links spread through messaging groups, and some lead to sites that install malware or push you to copy and run commands. Our guide to the fake CAPTCHA ClickFix scam explains one of the most common tricks.

Treat links on April 1 the way you would any day: check where they lead before clicking, do not install apps from links in messages, and never enter passwords or payment details on a page you reached through a joke or giveaway. Pranks that involve real accounts, such as changing a friend's settings or voice assistant, can also go wrong; our page on whether voice assistants can be hacked covers why access to devices matters.

Children and older relatives are the most likely to be caught by prank messages that look official. A quick family reminder each spring, that no company gives away phones for clicking a link, saves trouble.

Other famous tech April Fools' jokes

Google was the best known, but not the only company with a tradition. Over the years, technology firms, game studios and brands have joined in, with fake products, fake features and fake rebrandings. Some, like Google's, were elaborate and polished; others were a single social media post. As with Google, several companies have scaled back in recent years, while others still enjoy the day.

The best-remembered tech jokes share Google's style: they took a real product and imagined a ridiculous but just-possible extension of it, presented with complete seriousness. The ones that went wrong, like Mic Drop, changed how a real product behaved in a way people could not easily undo. That distinction, harmless fiction versus a real change to something people rely on, is the clearest rule for anyone planning an April 1 joke today.

April Fools' hoaxes before Google

April Fools' Day is centuries old, and its exact origin is uncertain, though customs of playing tricks in early spring appear in European records from at least the 1500s and 1600s. In France, the day is still known as Poisson d'avril, April fish, with children taping paper fish to people's backs. Media hoaxes came much later. The most famous is the BBC's 1957 Panorama report on the Swiss spaghetti harvest, showing a family picking spaghetti from trees, which led viewers to call asking how to grow their own.

Google's jokes belong to that tradition of the trusted source telling an obviously absurd story with a straight face. The spaghetti harvest worked because few British viewers in 1957 knew how pasta was made; Google's jokes worked because few people knew exactly what Google's engineers could do. In both cases, the joke depended on trust, which is also why it could cause problems when people believed it.

If you plan an April Fools' joke at work

For businesses and teams that still want to mark the day, the lessons from Google's history are practical. Keep the joke separate from anything customers rely on, such as email, payments or account settings. Make it clearly a joke within a moment of reading, rather than hoping people check the date. Avoid anything that could be mistaken for a security alert, outage or real policy change. Avoid jokes that make fun of customers, depend on fake urgency or touch on sensitive news. And have a plan to remove it quickly if it goes badly.

In a time of AI-made fakes and fast-moving misinformation, the safest April 1 jokes are obviously absurd, short-lived and kind. That is close to what Google's best jokes were: no one really believed in toilet broadband or talking tulips, but everyone enjoyed imagining them.

Finally, check the joke with people outside the team that made it. If someone unfamiliar with the plan believes it, or feels uncomfortable, rethink it before April 1 rather than after.

What this page said in 2020

The original version of this page, from April 1, 2020, noted that Google had canceled its April Fools' jokes that year and shared a collection of past joke videos, including Screen Cleaner, Google Tulip, Gboard Spoon, the Hummus API, Play for Pets, Google Wind, Google Nose, Coffee to the Home and Fiber to the Pole, as technology people wished were real. This rewrite turns that collection into a complete history of Google's April Fools' tradition, from MentalPlex in 2000 to the cancellation in 2020, with the jokes that became real and the one that went wrong.

Six years on, the list of videos in that post has become a record of a tradition that ended, rather than a sampler of one that would continue, and the history around them is what makes them interesting today.

Google April Fools' jokes: frequently asked questions

Ethan still opens Google on April 1, out of habit, though he knows nothing will be there. He has a playlist of the old videos instead, with Google Tulip at the top, and shows them to friends who never saw them. The Pokémon he caught on Google Maps in 2014 is long gone, but the game it helped inspire is still on his phone.

Revision note. Written October 3, 2026, rewriting our April 1, 2020 collection of Google's April Fools' videos into a complete history of the tradition, from MentalPlex in 2000 to its cancellation in 2020. May every surprise in your inbox be a good one.