Seems that the founders of Google were very affected by the movie Mary Poppins. Not only is Google feeding the birds, but they are actually employing them to perform their complex page ranking decisions. Yes, PigeonRank™ has finally been unveiled as the heart of the Google search engine. From the article …

“PigeonRank’s success relies primarily on the superior trainability of the domestic pigeon (Columba livia) and its unique capacity to recognize objects regardless of spatial orientation. The common gray pigeon can easily distinguish among items displaying only the minutest differences, an ability that enables it to select relevant web sites from among thousands of similar pages.”

It goes on to say …

“The ease of training pigeons was documented early in the annals of science and fully explored by noted psychologist B.F. Skinner, who demonstrated that with only minor incentives, pigeons could be trained to execute complex tasks such as playing ping pong, piloting bombs or revising the Abatements, Credits and Refunds section of the national tax code.”

The whole article can be found here, http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html. And yes, it’s a little early for April Fools, but if I need to sit through a 3 year election cycle, I’ll take humor wherever I can find it.