Google launches Google Nose, shuts down YouTube as April Fool's prank

It’s that time of the year again, where you cannot believe everything you see and read. And like every April Fool’s day, Google has taken the responsibility to be the first one to launch gags.

Google – with its best straight face – has chosen April 1 to launch its new service Google Nose where you can “go beyond type, talk, and touch for a new notation of sensation.” Essentially, you can now use Google to not just search for things, you can also use it to smell your favourite things.

Hitting the “Try Google Smell” button on the home page of the service will throw up a random result in Google Search. Besides websites and images pertaining to the keywords, there will now be a panel on the right of the screen where Google Aromabase will describe the product and smell to you. Using the “Smell” button, you will be able to inhale its aroma (or stench, depending on the random product)

We hit the “Try now” button and waited for Google’s randomiser to surprise us with a smell. We were not disappointed as Google threw up results for the smell of “success”. Needless to say, the description for the smell of success read, “sweet”. Success is sweet, indeed.

We don’t need to tell you how our experience with trying to smell it went, right? Google instructed us to bring our nose as close as possible to the screen to smell. The search giant had the last laugh as people stared at us trying to smell our monitors.

Google took a dig at itself too. It showed up “Google I/O” in the smell search result too. The search engine described the smell of the biggest Google event as, “Gadgets, over-heated computers and innovation.” Hilarious!

On the Google Nose page, the search giant described the service as something that “leverages new and existing technologies to offer the sharpest olfactory experience available.” The company said that its database of smell had been created using Street Sense vehicles that inhaled and indexed smells around millions of atmospheric miles and Android Ambient Odor Detection that collected smell via Android devices, amongst other methods.

The service is still in beta but Google also announced that you can use Nose with its other services. You can scratch and smell Google Books and Food-based Google Doodles or “Foodles”. You can also use Nosed captions on YouTube to smell your videos.

Speaking of YouTube, Google is all set to shut its video service down – as part of an April Fool’s prank, of course. Google announced that at the stroke of midnight, it would be shutting YouTube down. The founders of the video hosting website said in a three minute clip that the service was founded eight years ago with the aim of finding the best video ever.

They announced that starting April 1, YouTube would not be accepting any more submissions, but will instead be putting 30,000 of the service’s technicians to work in order to find the best video ever on YouTube. When the site goes online again after 10 years in 2023, YouTube will consist of only one video- the one they crown winner. "Gangnam Style has the same chance of winning as a video with 40 views of a man feeding bread to a duck," YouTube CEO Salar Kamangar said.

Google will also give the winner a clip-on MP3 player and $500 for their next creative endeavour. How nice!