Thaindian News

By Madhuri Dey
Apr 2, (THAINDIAN NEWS) Yesterday was April Fool’s Day, and no wonder that with everyone pulling every conceivable prank on everybody else, Google would not be left far behind. The world’s biggest search engine is anyway known for the changes in logos that it undertakes with every occasion, making the homepage look very interesting and very much in sync with the incumbent season or occasion. On April Fools’ Day too, Google decided to pull off a prank on its millions of users, and a very believable one as well. For a whole day. it changed its name to Topeka, same as the city in Kansas.

That is to say, whenever anyone browsed to the homepage of Google, instead of “Google” being written on the top of the search bar, one found the name Topeka inscribed. Needless to say, it created a lot of interest, and it was generally assumed that the search engine has officially rechristened itself. This idea particularly caught on as Google has a fetish of launching new products on April Fool’s Day in 2004, it had launched Gmail on this very day.

However, it soon became clear that it was nothing but Google’s idea of an April Fool joke. The idea seems to have originated from the decision of the Mayor of Topeka, who had decided to change the name of the city to Google in order to gain the attention of the search engine mammoth with regard to a new project. Google, in return, announced that it would be changing its name to Topeka to honor the city. Google obviously decided to cash in on this incident, and actually rechristened itself for a day.