The days when a whoopee cushion or a plastic snake constituted an acceptable April Fools’ Day joke are long gone.

With the elevated capabilities of technology comes a heightened standard for pranks. In the tech world, April Fools’ Day is a chance for a whole workforce of geeks and nerds to prove that their programming-adept fingers share a limb with their funny bones.

This year, the first day of April brought in a new wave of jokes from some of the biggest players in business and binary. From Internet blogs to tech guru sites, the World Wide Web was overrun with mischievous misinformation. Here are a few of my favorite April Fools’ fallacies.

Google Really Advanced Search

Ever wish you could narrow down your Google search results with more specific search queries? Google knows that, and the innovative company capitalized on this common need by releasing Google Really Advanced Search in the first few hours of April. On the page, visitors could specify searches in many categories. These included ‘rhyming slang for,’ ‘calque or loanword origin’ and my personal favorite: ‘looping midi music in the genre of,’ for which I chose dubstep. The bottom of the page stated that searchers could also tickle a unicorn or search by odor. All the links led to a Google page with search results for the phrase ‘April Fools’ because whoever was actually searching with these tools obviously needed an explanation.

Google Tap

Another prank up Google’s sleeve was Google Tap. This feature promised to revolutionize the art of communication by restricting users to dots and dashes so that everything was entered in Morse code. Unless you reached the upper echelon of Girl or Boy Scouts, are an avid climber of Mount Everest or are a spy, odds are that you don’t know Morse code. In case you hoped the feature was real and worried about your ability to type messages, Google thoughtfully put together an easy-to-learn Morse code chart. The video accompanying the release promised that typing from your pocket would be easier than ever before and those with fat fingers would benefit most significantly. Quite devastatingly, when hitting the ‘download this app for your phone’ button, it redirected to a page informing that ‘Oops! Gmail Tap is a bit too popular right now. We suggest you try downloading it again next year.’ Until next April Fools’ Day, I guess it’s manual entry for us all.

TechCrunch report on Facebook hate button

Since the birth of Facebook’s ‘like’ button, users have clamored for its other half, the ‘dislike button.’ According to a post by TechCrunch blog, the ‘hate’ button is making an entrance. The opening lines of the post stated, ‘In 2010, TechCrunch broke the news that Facebook was going to release a ‘Like’ button for the whole darn Internet. Now, TechCrunch has learned Facebook is considering a ‘Hate’ button as well.’ As a considerably gullible individual, I believed this until I stumbled across the following line: ‘Other buttons under consideration are the ‘Meh,’ ‘Love,’ ‘Who Cares’ and ‘+11’ but there is also a fear this could lead to a button explosion.’ Although I’m saddened that I can’t ‘hate’ the status of that girl from high school who always posts pictures of her cats, I appreciated the humorous blog post nonetheless.

April 1 has come and gone. But with 363 days until April Fools’ Day 2013, there’s no doubt that tech giants are working on another batch of comedic calamity to release upon the world.

Jessica Smith is a senior information management and technology and television, radio and film dual major. Her column appears every Tuesday. She can be reached at [email protected].

Published on April 2, 2012 at 12:00 pm