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Google Introduces, Then Scraps, Bing-Style Background Images
NIN1385 writes "Google has scrapped the now infamous background image option on its homepage. After 14 hours of a scheduled 24-hour experiment to see how people liked (or disliked) the new homepage layout, the company must have found out it was very disliked. I guess the fact that 'remove Google background' was the seventh most searched for phrase today might have had something to do with it."
Google was browser sniffing again and didnt offer this "feature" to Opera users (who could get it to work simply by identifying as any of the supported browsers,) Opera users rejoiced.
"His name was James Damore."
The feature still seems to be available - so you can set an image if you want, but I guess they won't be providing you with one of their own picked images as a default.
Always proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
Now if only they'd get rid of that awful text fading in. What's that about?
There is a reason why few people use Bing, Yahoo!, Live, Ask, etc. if Google wants to branch out in different directions, do it under a different banner other than Google search.
People like the way Google is/was, if they didn't, there would be a flood of people going to Bing, Yahoo!, Ask, and all the other search engines. Because there isn't, you can pretty easily realize that people like the way Google is.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
There were also a couple of snarky tweets from Microsoft regarding the "bing-style" backgrounds.
If you can't mod them join them.
First, Google seems to have forgotten the early days of the search engine wars in which Yahoo, Excite, et al vied for the most user-hostile, craptacular portal landing pages. I believe it was primarily their choice of a minimal utilitarian design that made people flock to Google, and the quality of the search results, good as they were, was a distant secondary factor among typical users.
Secondly, the actual execution of this feature was terrible. Not only were the images bright, garish, and distracting, but there was NO option to turn it off. Sure if you spent a few minutes digging you could find the "editor's choice" images, and if you scrolled all the way down to the bottom you could find white. But then if you picked that, you would get white text on a white background. Brilliant.
Google has said in the past that they use an empirical, incremental approach to UI design where user actions are studied and these guide decisions down to the level of how many pixels to make a line or what font size to use. Some have rightly pointed out that this will cause you to get stuck on local maxima and you need to have a methodology that allows for some creative design. But forcing such a butt ugly intrusion on all users for the purposes of a trial is ridiculous. If they really wanted to do a trial they could have simply served this to, say, 1 in 10,000 users (based on IP+useragent hash, for example) and got the exact same information.
No, this could only have been the brainchild of a marketroid who thought it would be necessary to "make a splash" and get some "buzz" going. Well congratulations, you got your feedback and the answer is a resounding "fuck off". Google has officially run out of ideas if this is the best they can come up with.
Their idea of minimalism is clearly dead. Why do I need an image distracting me from a page I only visit for a couple seconds? It is not like a desktop which you will be looking at a lot. I go to Google.com to search the web, not look at a picture. To even attempt something like this shows they have lost their way.
I only use the Pac-Man page.
I just checked and Google.com still shows a "Change Background Image" link in the lower left corner, so it looks more like it's still an option, they just realized they confused people by defaulting it to on for a few hours.
Anyway, it's just an option now. Nobody's forcing you to use it. I suspect the Slashdot crowd keeps it pretty real on the "give me a plain white background or give me death" tip, but a lot of people like this sort of silly eye candy.
Anybody else remember back when we all switched to using Google *because* of the plain white background and simple layout?
The popularity of Google was and will always be because of less clutter compared to Yahoo, MSN, Altavista. Fast loading of their homepage was why I stuck with them even though their searches some times were not as precise as others in some areas.
I don't want them to go Bing's way. White is good enough for me.
Honestly, I haven't seen the main Google page in a while. Had no one sent me the link, I would've missed Pac-Man day.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
Google is finding out again (and has found out before) that, because they are the default search engine for so many people, they can't really make large interface changes. I recall reading that they would like to remove the "I'm feeling lucky" button (because no one uses it), but they can't. Users simply can't handle large changes. This is a sad truth of many consumers, especially in computers: change of any kind prohibits many users from functioning, even when that change would have almost no impact on them.
My other sig is clever.
I thought this was just a one-day thing they were doing to show they're aware of the oilpocalypse. Bing has pretty pictures but I don't actually use it for anything. As Stephen Colbert said "Bing is the best search engine. I know because I googled it."
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
When I look at a great photograph, I have an emotional response. It's certainly pleasant when I am at a photo exhibit on the weekend but when I'm just searching for documentation on a jquery plugin it's simply distracting and breaks my concentration.
You know something has gone seriously wrong in your company when your employees are ripping off Microsoft's ideas.
Did they really expect their hardcore users to embrace that crap? I had a bit of tear in my eye, that it was the end of the era of google doing the right thing.
RiGgA
Many, many folks (including myself) got quite vocal about it on the Google Support forums:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Web+Search/label?lid=54fe34ede196c261&hl=en
It was entertaining to see the range of reactions during the last 12-14 hours.
The most interesting take was from my dad who called me up and asked me if he had a virus or something, I can only imagine how most "normal" people reacted to this change today.
crazy dynamite monkey
And I had just finished telling Google what I thought of their new system by creating a plain white image with the word "sucks" strategically placed in the upper right hand corner...and selecting it as my google background. Wonder how many people messed around like this.
I must be the only person on the whole internet who didn't really care about this. Why bother visiting the Google homepage anyway? I just search from Firefox's search box.
although it opened up a lot of jokes around the office about google/bing.
http://www.google.com/custom?hl=en&client=google-coop-np
I use this uri no adds, no fuss, simple return of search results. The way it should be.
You still have the option to set the background image. What was scrapped was Google setting an image for you when you had not previously selected one.
Honestly, I rather like it. The pictures in their gallery are not offensive in the least and provide a nice bit of somewhat blandish eye-candy.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
I just wished it would have shown the background in the search results too:)
See, it was all a plan - give us a day of "Google as Bing" and demonstrate with cold hard data that people don't like Bing's style and prefer Google. Shut up carpers among stockholders that were screaming "do something!" to respond to Bing grabbing 2 percent market share, AND wipe MS's nose it it.
Yeah, that was the plan all along.
This space available.
I can't speak for Yahoo, Live, Ask, etc., but from what I've noticed from most home users (you know, the ones who buy their computers at Best Buy and use them as is), they all use Bing. It has nothing to do with what people prefer. It's what's set as the default and most people use it.
People actually go to the Google homepage?
But seriously, you do anything, and you're going to find people a vocal group, perhaps even a majority that hate it. But you know what? It doesn't matter. It's a trivial change. Who is going to say, "Oh, they have a background on their default page. That completely changes my search experience. Screw that. I'm switching to Ask.com ." No one, that's who. If this is what you can find to complain about, there's nothing to complain about.
Times like this I'd find it refreshingly honest if Google's FAQ said:
Q: How can I disable the background image?
A: You can't. Get used to it. You can't change the Google Doodle either.
How about we go back to the CGA amber CRT screen where we have a command line, no windows, no mouse, and a 5.25" floppy drive to save our work on? Things progress whether you like it or not so give 'em a break...
I didn't like it, but i could tolerate it. What I cannot stand is the sidebar. Why the fsck would I use that when the links at the top already do the same thing but better/without clutter?
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Coke had the #1 product in its market segment. Unsatisfied with this, they formulated New Coke, which was practically a tribute to the #2 product in its class: Pepsi.
Turns out, people chose Coke over Pepsi because they actually preferred Coke over Pepsi, and not because of , say, the bottle shape or the name.
So then they scrapped New Coke and nobody missed it.
I guess the fact that 'remove Google background' was the seventh most searched for phrase today might have had something to do with it."
So people were searching for 'remove Google background'' from the very page that had the 'remove Google background'' link on it? There goes a little more of my faith in humanity.
I checked. The image I got was around 200KB in size. That's got to add up over all the visits to the Google home page.
Nothing interesting to say...MUST...NOT...REPLY...ohtheheckwithit.
Actually it's not like it's better to have a background, or worse. It's just different. People find change jarring.
It's all perfectly natural that people want Google the way it always used to be... What I find amusing is the people going into length explanations about why a background image is such a terrible thing.
It's the New Coke thing again. In blind tasting, people preferred New Coke. When it was actually sold as something different, people hated it.
Google was simply testing for the desire of a certain "feature" (or what have you). Several (if not all) companies do such a thing to see if there are ways to grow in consumer demand. Sure, many companies have had failed experiments (Pepsi Clear and New Coke come to mind first). That does not make the company or person a failure. Its a way to test for growth in popularity.
If no company tested what consumers would like, imagine how our computers would function right now (or our cars, TVs, etc etc). You get the point.
Sadly I first thought I was at Bing this morning when I saw the feature.
1) Emulate absurd feature of competitor ...
2) Wait for public upheaval
3) Concede to users' outrage
4) Make it into a news story
5)
6) Profit!
What many people may have gotten from this:
"Wow, Bing still does that? Google was good enough to axe it. Google cares about users. Bing is Tacky"
Google! Just stop! Please stop messing with your search page. We don't want or need your fade-in effects of the menu, we just want the menu. We don't want background images or anything fancy. Just leave it alone!
Update June 10, 11:31AM: Last week, we launched the ability to set an image of users’ choosing as the background for the Google homepage. Today, we ran a special “doodle” that showcased this functionality by featuring a series of images as the background for our homepage. We had planned to run an explanation of the showcase alongside it—in the form of a link on our homepage. Due to a bug, the explanatory link did not appear for most users. As a result, many people thought we had permanently changed our homepage, so we decided to stop today’s series early. We appreciate your feedback and patience as we experiment and iterate.
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
Seriously, I can't remember the last time I've actually visited bare google.com before today, when on a forum people complained about this new feature. I do all my searches from the address bar in Opera, and I really can't think of a reason for actually visiting google.com without any query already in progress.
U+F8FF
glad I switched.
All the fun and interesting things they do with the logo.
I remember reading an article that Google has a bunch of real-time displays at their main office, such as sample search terms, top search terms, etc.
That must have been pretty funny today.
that is the interface they should have switched to : gooatgle! write your search terms on a piece of paper and stuff it in the hole to submit your supplication to the Oracle .
haha.. Very amusing. :)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I remember back in the day when yahoo was king, they had a simple search box and a few links. As time went on they stacked more link, videos, news feeds, ads, movie trailers, celebrity gossip, etc....Same thing happened to msn, bing is slightly better but Im sure it will be bloated in a year or 2. People got tired of it all and went to google. If they want news they will goto a new site.
The links all worked as designed for me, but I had to be signed into a Google account to remove the background. Screw that shit.
I really much liked the feature. It allowed to make own personal search site.
The idea was much better than in Bing.
Only bad designs were that background was set by default. What got many so angry about it.
If Google listens, it will keep the background feature as optional.
But same time it should allow more customizations as well.
Possibility to hide google site top bar (Web, Pictures, Maps, Blogs etc searches) so user could show/hide it with simple small transparent icon on top right corner.
Secondly, have a possibility to lockdown the user accoung so you can not change background or even user or logout. This would help many small companies to make public computer where people would use google search, but the google page could be added with company own background (still keeping the Google logo there etc).
I really much liked the idea. Now I just want to have the topbar hided. Even better if it would "fade in" only when hovering mouse over the top edge of the google site.
That would make the Google page so clear and simply to use!
Google didn't "scrap" the idea because of user dislike. They posted on their blog from the beginning they were going to cycle the best images for 24 hours for user awareness. Users who wish to continue using it have the option. "Google Introduces, Then Scraps, Bing-Style Background Images" is misleading at best. What happened was planned, was not effected by user feedback, and has not been scrapped.
in the screenshot that the guy posted above, it clearly says "Remove background image" in the bottom left.. how did you (and presumably millions of others who Googled "remove google background") miss that?
Because my laptop's monitor is 1024x600 pixels, and that picture is 1280x1024 pixels. Or was "Remove background image" put above the fold on all systems?
I think Google try to bring some wallpaper kind of stuff to its Chrome OS which is mostly a browser. It is a trial run to get a feel of it.. :-) looks ugly?, just remove it. IMHO I need better index than better background
bits and bytes of life should serve the needy - My bits and bytes
Not quite.
The really surprising thing with Coke / New Coke / Pepsi was that in blind taste tests people reliably preferred pepsi to coke by a large margin, even people who claimed that they strongly preferred coke... yet the market didn't agree when coke rolled out new coke (which was equal to or better than pepsi in the blind tests).
So Coke's change was well grounded but reality turned out to be too strange for science.
From Google HQ:
Google Cash Back is designed to help advertisers reach you with compelling offers, and to provide a new type of shopping experience that will change user behavior and attract a bunch of new users to Google. We have put in new programs for you and our advertisers designed to provide amazing shopping experiences for consumers and great opportunities for advertisers.
Our strategy for Google remains evergreen – working hard to understand the intent of your search and helping you make smarter decisions and complete important tasks.
Shopping remains one of the most important tasks people engage in while using search, and we remain committed to delivering great shopping experiences for you that help you make better shopping decisions, get great deals, and save time and money along the way. For merchants and advertisers, we have some ideas for making it easy to get a broader array of products and offers into Google, and we’ll share some details on this later this summer.
BTW, another important task is implemented our swell new feature called Google Background - we hope you like it!
Don't be evil!
http://duckduckgo.com/
This decision by Google is symptomatic of so much that's wrong is software.
I remember when Google first came out, Altavista was the dominant search engine then and it was a mess. A page full of blinking ads, where one had to search for the search input. Google was a refreshing change, with that clean look. Now they are doing their best to throw it away. Pity.
But that's not so different from the software world in general, people seem to find it pretty hard to leave well enough alone, although one *remarkable* exception to this rule seems to be Linus Torvalds, he has definitely rejected an attempt to create Linux version 3.
There are so many examples of people who should have celebrated their success and gone to other projects. KDE and Python are the most relevant examples, IMHO. KDE 3 and Python 2 were superb, outstanding pieces of human creation. KDE 4 and Python 3 suck.
And there are many other examples of software that tried to fix inexistent problems. For example, there was a time when every Linux distro had a utility called Lilo, for "Linux Loader". Lilo was simple, easy to configure, worked perfectly. Then someone thought he could improve Lilo and created an abomination called "Grub". Last time I looked there were 185 files in the Grub configuration directory in my computer. How many files do you need to choose which partition you want to boot? Oh, but wait! Grub lets you configure an image that will be shown as the background when you choose the partition to boot! I guess that makes it worthwhile to have 185 files instead of one file to configure, right?
Another example, Linux used to have something called the open Sound System, or OSS. Then someone tried to improve it and created something called ALSA, for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture. The problem is that OSS followed the Unix philosophy being simple, modular, and following the principle that "everything looks like a file". ALSA does not, doing development in ALSA is a PITA.
Why, oh why, cannot people see the beauty of keeping things simple?
I'll just go to search.yahoo.com... nice and clean, just the way google used to be
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I have been using the https version of Google since I found out about it and had no idea Google had done this. I quite like it, even if it is a bit slow loading although reading the comments it looks like the first implementation of it was a bit rubbish.
I care not for your karma and your mod points.
about:blank
Fortunately, for the rest of us, google.com still exists and continues to improve as it has done for the past few years.
Though I like to think it was due in part to the image I uploaded once I found there was no way to get rid of it. :-)
I did learn that you could go to "Editor's Picks" and scroll and the last one (hard to see, natch) which was "white" but then the text was still shadow-y which I think looked kinda cool on the logo but it made the small text almost impossible to read. (Not that I read the small text on the page, but it's annoying to have unreadable text visible.)
Maybe their next innovation will be background images on the search results pages. How cool would that be?!?!?
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
That's exactly what he wants you to believe.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yeah that really irritated me too until I found this firefox extension to remove it:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10113/
I don't get it - why do people go through that extra step of going to the Google homepage to begin searching? My browsers' home pages are set to about:blank; and when I want to Google something, I use the Search Bar in FF and the address bar in Chrome (I don't use IE if I can help it but even that has a search bar!).
I was also thinking this was their version of the New Coke / Coke Classic strategy.
If I had to pick one thing about Bing which was better than Google, it would be the background. They're very interesting and stimulating. Unfortunately most of the rest of the Bing service is a Google wannabe and delivers subpar results.
Same here, after over a decade of Googling I switched to StartPage to see how indispensable Google really was, right in the week Google decides to do something cool with their homepage.
But... the future refused to change.
I found myself focusing in on how beautiful the images were, so I went to Blackel.com and could get back to work. Google has a good product, as it stands, maybe if they want to Bing Up a web page, then allow the user to select it, not just throw it on us like a wet towel.
Maybe I'm just lucky, but this is spam protection I'd be willing to pay for (but please don't tell Google).
Corporations do pay for it, as the service Postini. We use it at my company to prevent spam from getting through to our Exchange server.
I think one reason it works so well is that between Gmail users and corporate Postini customers, Google has a huge fresh corpus of data to train the system, and to identify new spam campaigns right away. For instance if the same e-mail hits a ton of addresses at the same time, it's a good bet it's a spam campaign.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
what I believe is, Google did this on purpose to encourage people to complain.
what this mean is 2 fold; 1. google gets in the news about a change to their site, people go to the site to check it out and complain.. 2. site gets returned to normal, people feel relaxed and happy its back and then googles some more, by doing this google refreshes its image as a simple search engine, because people still have in their minds, OMG how could you change this... boosts profits of advertising and encourages loyalty.
People complaining about google doesn't mean much to them, especially with something minor such as changing a background. but have 20 million people see this and then realise its gone will bring (if only temporary) a sign of relief. think of it as a carrot process, you entice users by showing something they dislike and then reward them when they find something they like, it makes the users feel accomplished and feel more part of the process.
now think of when those people are relieved they will then make use of this new fancy search engine they helped make.... even if it is an illusion.
remember they arent just IT techs at google, they have psychologists too.
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
When you click the new Change background image button... it displays a bunch of random images, and the text "Only select images that you have confirmed that you have the license to use."
Oh, yes, and a search box... typing the name of an image seems to show a bunch of images from other people's public Picasa albumss
I wonder what happens if you type 'goatse.cx' into the search box... hmm...
I call bullcrap.
I saw the link fine - and if it didn't want me to login to a Google account to VIEW the bloody explanation I would have read it.
That said, I probably only saw the link because my 3G connection loaded the background image like a 2400bps modem.
Never used bing, so I had no idea about that angle. Saw the background option this morning, and now I have a nice, mist-shrouded valley for my google background.
What's the big deal?
Google jumped the shark on this one
I agree with most people. The background images were quite annoying. They upset the simplicity of the Google search page.
But, the images themselves were great. Does anybody know where Google picked them up from? Is there a handy link to browse those images? They may just make a good background for my desktop.
This really smacked of New Coke. They should have left it off and let anyone who wanted it turn it on. Recalls the Buzz launch.
Looks like they've brought it back, with an option to remove it and show the normal page. I'm happy.
Since they did that I've changed my browser home page to: http://www.google.com/pacman/. Nice plain white background, and you get to play Pac Man.
I'm willing to bet that at least 50% of uploaded images were pornography of some sorts... Y'all should have seen the thousands of posts to chan boards featuring human sexuality in all its "splendor"...
Oddly after everyone saying that Google pulled the option, I still can change the background...
ah personal whitelists, is there anything they can't do.
Clearly too many people still use 400 MHz PIII's or something, where a CSS driven text fade in is too much to ask. Humph.
The truth is Google CAN'T CODE !!!
Yah, they seemed to be geniuses but they really just bought all that AMAZING code from SOMEONE ELSE and now they just sit on it !!
GOOGLE CAN'T CODE !
I can see why people wouldn't want the background image, and I remember being annoyed that I couldn't easily find a way to change or turn off the image.
But I actually liked the splash of color the images brought to the screen. The only thing I wanted from Google was for them to give details
on the images themselves... i.e. who took the shots, what were the shots of/where were they taken, etc.
IANAL, but I play one on