Internet search giant Google, which has a precedence of sorts for pulling April Fools’ Day pranks, this time round went global in its honor of the Kansas capital, by changing its online logo to “Topeka” for one day – Thursday, April
1, 2010.

The move comes in response to an early-last-month proclamation by the Topeka Mayor Bill Bunten that the city’s name for the month of March will be ‘Google’ – a supposed publicity-seeking stunt to draw Google’s attention towards the city as a potential test-bed for the “Fiber for Communities” technology initiative.

With the Google. com site popping up the name “Topeka” in the distinctive blue, red, yellow and green, an accompanying official statement said: “We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honor that moving gesture. Today, we are pleased to announce that as of 1 AM (Central Daylight Time) April 1st, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka.”

In addition, the Web site also showed the “Topeka” sign outside Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters.

Meanwhile, Bunten has no clue whether the horsing around has actually raised Topeka’s chances of becoming one of the chosen communities – which Google will announce by the year-end - for the Google Fiber project.

Nonetheless, noting that Google’s Fools Day move is supposedly “just an extension of a good sense of humor that we have and that they have,” Bunten added: “But we have brought our city a lot of attention.”