Effective today, Google, the largest search engine in the world, has changed it’s name to Topeka:

A permanent change? According to the Google Topeka blog yes. An April Fools prank? Of course but the story behind it is interesting. In February, Google announced they are considering building their own, super fast, Internet backbone. By ‘backbone’ I mean the physical wires all Internet traffic goes through. It’s no secret that American Internet connection speeds lag behind many other countries and Google plan to do something about it.

This came out just before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released it’s own national broadband plan. The Google network will initially be in select US regions, the question is what regions? That’s where Topeka, the Capital city of Kansas with a population of under 250,000, comes in. As part of a coordinated marketing effort the city has created a Facebook group, promotional videos and, believe it or not, even changed the name of the city to Google in the hope of being one of those regions:

This is not the first time Topeka has changed it’s name. In 1998 it was “ToPikachu”, a Pokemon character! And everyone is getting in on the promotion, here is one of the marketing videos imploring people to get involved:

Still think this is a prank? Don’t listen to me, check out CNN.com, they detailed this on March 2nd. If this works, Topeka won’t be fools at all! 🙂