Google must have a significant prank budget

By Peter Vogel

Search engine Giant Google's engineers have been having fun lately. Hardly a week goes by without a novel product rollout of one kind or another.

April 1 was certainly a day for the Google boys to have fun. The Mountain View California company has become famous for its April Fool's pranks, perhaps hoping to take on the mantle from the BBC for best prank of all time. The British broadcaster produced some of the best known of all first of April pranks, among them the Swiss Spaghetti Harvest and astronomer Patrick Moore's reduced gravity stunt.

Google clearly has a significant budget for its pranks. This year's Google TiSP offering claimed to be the world's first truly free broadband wireless Internet service. Potential customers could request a kit consisting of 1,000 feet of fibre optic cable, a router, and a pair of plastic gloves, the latter to be used to lower the fibre cable down through a residential toilet, with one or more flushes, to where it would eventually be "plugged in" by Google's PHDs (Plumbing Hardware Dispatchers).

This was no one-page prank either. A complete site, with FAQs, instructions, a discussion group, and online help was provided, all the better to hook unwary visitors. Visitors lacking technical know-how could schedule a house call by a team of "nanobots" which would presumably sneak in when the toilet in question was unoccupied.

As this is written, the full site is still operating at www.google.com/tisp, the "TiSP" of course standing for Toilet Internet Service Provider. Be sure to read the press release.

Presumably the prank was put together by Google's "real" wireless team, as the company has been working on a large-scale wireless project near its California headquarters.

Meanwhile, over at the company's Gmail division, a smaller scale ruse was pulled off. Users of the Web mail product were offered free hard copies of all their e-mail, to be delivered in boxes. "Everyone loves Gmail, but not everyone loves e-mail, or the digital era. Whatever happened to stamps, filing cabinets, and the mailman? Well, you asked for it, and it's here. We're bringing it back."

In typical Google fashion, "free" meant ad-supported. In this case that was to mean advertisements in "36-point red, bold, Helvetica text" on environmentally friendly paper produced from "soybean sputum." As for e-mail attachments, no problem: "Photo attachments are printed on high-quality, glossy photo paper, and secured to your Gmail paper with a paper clip."

Once the laughs stopped it was back to the serious business of unleashing new applications, something Google hasn't been short of since it went public a couple of years ago.

On April 6 Google quietly rolled out an experimental Yellow-Pages-type service based on voice activation technology. 1-800-GOOG411 is quite remarkable, even in this early form. Although intended for American customers only at this point, the telephone number does work from the Greater Vancouver area, and frequent border hoppers may find this a useful service.

In typical Google fashion the service, presently named Google Voice Local Search, is straightforward in its operation. I ran two tests. In the first I said "Seattle, Washington" followed by "Space Needle" and was then given options to hear driving directions or to be directly connected, by phone, to the Space Needle tickets desk. In the second test I used "Sequim, Washington" and asked for the Safeway. Again, an address was read out and I was provided with the same access options. I could also have the directions sent as a text message.

In fact that may be the real strength of the service: being able to use it from a cellular phone. No need to thumb through a thick directory or to key in a business name. Just say "Tony's Deli" and ask to be connected.

Yes, the GOOG411 service is described as experimental (a beta if you will) but it certainly seems plausible that it will soon put a significant dent in the paper and online commercial directory business. Watch for Microsoft, which recently acquired voice-recognition company Tellme, to enter this space in the near future.

Free program of the week

Restoration 2.5, obtainable from www.download.com, is a very small program, stark in its simplicity, that does one thing well: it restores lost files. Specify a drive, click on Search Deleted Files, and then select any you wish restored.

Peter Vogel is a Physics and Computer Sciences teacher at Notre Dame Regional Secondary School (www.ndrs.org). Suggestions and comments may be sent via e-mail to peterv@portal.ca.