What is the deal with Google’s PigeonRank/PageRank? I first saw the page explaining the pigeons about 6 months ago and was a little skeptical, figured it was a parody. But I happened to look again now, and that page is still there . The PageRank explanation is here.
You can also do a search on Google for “google pigeons” and you’ll find the page.
Is it a hoax?
(apologies if this is one of those explained-to-death dumb questions…)
Brilliant piece of comic writing.
It was an April fool’s joke. It’s still there because it’s still funny. 
Doesn’t the SDMB use hamsters?
SDMB used to have hampsters but they were too quick! They’ve now converted to some kind of South American turtle I think.
Hampsters turned out ot be way too slow because there is no such thing.
It’s helpful to understand that the Google pigeon joke is itself based on RFC 1149, “A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers”. The RFCs are a set of generally agreed-upon guidelines that the netowrkis supposed to follow, but there’s a tradition of issuing phony ones on April 1. RFC 1149 is probably the best well-known example.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: even though according to Spoz, I am a hamsterette (with weird font issues, no less!)… I have absolutely no connection with any hamsters the SDMB may possess.
F_X
[nitpick]
RFC 1149 has been implemented at least once
[/nitpick]
Gotta love those ping times and the packet loss numbers!
Funny, I heard Serget Brin give a talk in the Stanford CS seminar in January, 1997, on his idea for a new search engine and he never mentioned anything about pigeons.