Yes, some places more than others, though. It's not highly generally highly publicized.
That is, other than the "offical" April Fool's jokes. Googlers LOVE April Fool's day, and there's generally a solid handful of nonpublic April Fool's day jokes on campus.
But there's also just random pranks. Some I'm aware of:
- Everyone's photos on the internal people database (available on an internal website) showed up with either crazy sunglasses or mustaches. Someone, probably a vision researcher, used facial recognition to do in bulk.
- Eric's picture had a photo on the wall behind him, and the photo was very subtly swapped with a picture of Bill Gates.
- There was a long series of pranks having to do with pink plastic flamingos and the T-Rex skeleton in Mountain View that were quite funny, though I forgot the full sequence. It had to do with T-Rex being surrounded by pink flamingos, then someone changed it to flamingos attacking T-Rex, then someone else brought a giant can of "flamingo bait", and all the flamingos were lying dead around T-Rex. It unfolded over a week or two, with it changing every few days.
- I was on a team that pranked each other whenever someone went on vacation. The most memorable of which involved filling a 12'x12'x8' glass walled office from floor to ceiling with pink balloons: http://www.menalto.com/photos/miscellaneous/google/Pranks/20...
- For April Fools day this year, the internal corp login page rick-rolled everyone.
- Larry Page has this crusade to make meetings more efficient, so all around campus are these posters that say things like "All meetings should have a single decider" or "Meetings should not have more than 10 people". Well, soon after, a bunch of posters appeared saying motivational things like "You're building the future. Make it awesome." I couldn't tell if this was a very subtle troll or a well-intentioned but ultimately condescending attempt at motivating people, but in either case, the response is the same: troll harder. So with a couple friends, we put up posters that said things like "Read slogans", "You will do whatever this poster says", or "All meetings require a unicorn and a pony." Well, sure enough, after a couple days another round of posters went up that said things like "Red" (on a yellow poster) or similar absurdities. Then a day or so after that, another round of posters went up with "The posters will continue until morale improves."
- (I was on the same team as Scotty, but a couple years later, so we didn't overlap except socially.) When we got back from a team retreat in Pittsburgh, our work area was all cordoned off with police tape, with all the furniture turned upside down, courtesy of the people who hadn't gone.
