Tìngäzìk: a Retrospective – ep. 27 “Google Ja. Apr. 1”

Google Ja. Apr. 1

Expected solvable difficulty

• 1sample: experienced solvers knows past April Fools’ jokes from Google Japanese IME team
• 3samples: other experienced solvers
• keywords+: most solvers

Level design

This level was inspired by the past Google Japanese IME April Fools’ jokes. These are the jokes I’ve been watching every year until the pandemic stopped all the fun. Each year Google (Gboard) Japanese IME team makes a new text input product of a new theme. Recent products would also release a hardware blueprint and software source code so that you can make it on your own.

An interesting thing is that the page name always reflects nature of the joke product, and sometimes cryptic. Here are some of the past products:

Expected thought process

Find out the sample answers are pointing to the codename of Google Japanese IME April Fools’ jokes, and search for the code name of the given year in the question.