One of these things is not like the other.

Jeeves9000, GoogleGulp, Bloglines in Klingon, MSN spoofed results, Unlimited Gmail space, Yahoo Slacker?

April first brings out the playful side in the search engines and we get a mixed bag of tricks this year. From AskJeeves $400 dollar key-finding robot (sign me up!) to Google’s thirst quenching, DNA changing sports drink to MSN spoofing their results to Yahoo doing a good turn to college students everywhere, there’s plenty of fun to be had on April first. Additionally on Gmail’s first birthday, Google announces their new goal of infinity plus one storage.

Except that according to at least once source, they aren’t joking about the storage and at the bottom of my gmail it says I’m using 288 MB (20%) of 1447 MB. Plans are to bump it up to 2GB today and the ultimate goal is never deleting anything again.

To get a good wrap up of the April Fool’s jokes today, Search Engine Watch is always a good source for news. As for us, we’ll focus on the real news today.

Today in Real News:

Gmail to 2GB. True. They’ve also added rich text formatting and a spell checker. It’s still in beta, of course. Why? Well, perhaps the answer lies in the FAQ for Google Gulp.
11. When will you take Google Gulp out of beta?

Man, if you pressure us, you just drive us away. We’ll commit when we’re ready, okay? Besides, what’s so great about taking things out of beta? It ruins all the romance, the challenge, the possibilities, the right to explore. Carpe diem, ya know? Maybe we’re jaded, but we’ve seen all these other companies leap headlong into 1.0, thinking their product is exactly what they’ve been dreaming of all their lives, that everything is perfect and hunky-dory – and the next thing you know some vanilla copycat release from Redmond is kicking their butt, the Board is holding emergency meetings and the CEO is on CNBC blathering sweatily about “a new direction” and “getting back to basics.” No thanks, man. We like our freedom.

Yahoo releasing a new index. Despite sounding like a joke, actually quite true. Yahoo gives Danny credit for the idea of weather reports and says they’ll announce index updates from now on.

Google RideFinder. True but only available in select cities for only a few companies.

Susan Esparza is former managing editor at Bruce Clay Inc., and has written extensively for clients and internal publications. Along with Bruce Clay, she is co-author of the first edition of Search Engine Optimization All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies.

See Susan's author page for links to connect on social media.