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."

Comments

Opera users didnt have a problem

[Rockoon]

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.

Fire that marketroid!

[seanadams.com]

You might think a background image is nothing worth getting in a huge flap over, but let me explain why this experiment was so stupid.

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.

Not here

[Fnkmaster]

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?

Re:Thanks god.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if only they'd get rid of that awful text fading in. What's that about?

So stop running their JavaScript by default. NoScript works well for this purpose. Google.com works perfectly well without JS of any kind. If you use Gmail you'll need to allow JS from gmail.com but as gmail.com != google.com you can be selective here.

no fuss google url

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Google already said it was an accident....

[aengblom]

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