39 April Fool's Day Hoaxes By Google by Chris Trayhorn, Publisher of mThink Blue Book, March 31, 2010 Last year Google ran no less than 17 different April Fool’s Day hoaxes. I have always loved that a company that has so much on its plate takes the time to differentiate itself and build some positive brand equity by investing humor. The Google April Fool’s Day tradition started small in 2000 with the announcement of Google "MentalPlex", a search engine technology that used weather conditions, brainwaves and mouse speed to work out what you were searching for. There have been almost 40 such hoaxes by Googlesince then. Our favorite AdSense-based Google hoax after the jump, plus links to the other 38. AdSense for Conversations was announced on April 1st, 2008 as, "a new type of monetization solution that "puts the ‘context’ in contextual advertising". Now, in just a few simple steps, you can begin displaying ads that are relevant to the topics you’re discussing — in an unobtrusive screen above your head." 38 more Google April Fool’s jokes here. Filed under: Revenue Tagged under: Content Marketing, Industry, Paid Search, Viral Marketing About the Author Chris Trayhorn, Publisher of mThink Blue Book Chris Trayhorn is the Chairman of the Performance Marketing Industry Blue Ribbon Panel and the CEO of mThink.com, a leading online and content marketing agency. He has founded four successful marketing companies in London and San Francisco in the last 15 years, and is currently the founder and publisher of Revenue+Performance magazine, the magazine of the performance marketing industry since 2002.