Why Does Google Say Topeka Today : Why Did Google Change to Topeka

By Soumitra Mondal, Gaea News Network
Thursday, April 1, 2010

San Francisco (GaeaTimes.com) - The first day of April is the official prank day for Google. And guess what, Google changed its name to Topeka today. But don’t panic. The change is only for today so there is no possibility that you have to say ‘Just Topeka it’ anytime soon. However, there is a deeper story behind the selection of this name.

Topeka is the name of the not so famous capital of Texas and even in an April fool prank Google used it as an opportunity to show its gratitude to the city that has changed its name to Google for a month. The Kansas town Topeka is selected for Google’s ‘Fiber for Communities’ program. According to Google, the new infrastructure would provide 100 times faster internet access than normal.

We didn’t reach this decision lightly; after all, we had a fair amount of brand equity tied up in our old name

said CEO Eric Schmidt said in a blog post.

But the more we surfed around (the former) Topeka’s municipal website, the more kinship we felt with this fine city at the edge of the Great Plains.

The April fool prank was not only limited to the change of the name. YouTube said that their video service is sucking too much bandwidth and they have released a new video service called TEXTp. This will be a low tech, text only mode. Perhaps you remember the movie ‘The Matrix’.

When viewing in TEXTp mode, a message appeared saying,

By using text-only mode, you are saving YouTube $1 a second in bandwidth costs

Click here to go back to regular YouTube and happy April Fools Day!

Discussion

rikkis 12
April 6, 2010: 2:56 pm

topeka is the capital of kansas…not texas.

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