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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."
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.
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.
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.
You know something has gone seriously wrong in your company when your employees are ripping off Microsoft's ideas.
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.
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Google has officially run out of ideas if this is the best they can come up with.
Good. Maybe without ideas they'll stagnate and, as a result, remain popular.
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.
What? I thought it was because of the more relevant search results. Silly me.
Clever signature text goes here.
That's exactly why it was posted in plain text.
The spammers wouldn't have gotten his address from the image if you hadn't posted it in plain text.
I post my emails milsorgen@gmail.com and mils_orgen@hotmail.com in plain text all the time, really the consequences of such actions are minimal enough to warrant not caring about someone scraping slashdot posts. Shit I sign up for enough marketing material willingly enough as is I doubt any real spam would even register at this point aside from producing an occasional fun diversion.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Besides, anyone (with a paranoid brain) could have deduced it from your /. uid =]
Given that so many users use the Google search box as an address bar, I'm amazed that they manage to get as far as opening up their browser without accidentally electrocuting themselves.
Yeah, I posted abuse on the Google blog because of that.
They showed me a really interesting and nice picture as a background.. but I wasn't there to browse artistic photographs, I was there to a clean, simple, elegant and useful search interface.
Google does this ALL THE TIME with various apps. They make changes to the interface--usually good--that the user has no way of undoing. It's when the changes are bad or distracting that there is a problem. For example, they made a change to the mobile version of Reader a while back which made it incredibly easy to accidentally hit the "sign out" link. It was a horrible design choice, and there was no way for users to fix it themselves. No going back to the old interface.
That's the double-edged sword of web applications. Your users get automatic bug fixes, but they also get automatic upgrades to (possibly) inferior versions.
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 second the above. When I started using Google so many years ago, it was more because the page was lean and loaded fast then how relevant the search results were. And the lean simple home page is 100% of the reason al my browsers and the browsers of most of the machines I have worked on over the years have been set to use google.com as their start page. The search results were something I grew to like over time. But even to this day, the lean, simple, search page is at least 50% of the reason I use Google search primarily. Even all the little links and the "iGoogle" thing have been annoying to me at times. I want a page as lean and fast as possible. If they are going to put a bunch of crap on there that makes the page go slow I might as well go use Bing or whatever...there is no longer the big advantage keeping me going back to google.
They didn't "default it to on". They made it impossible to turn off. You could pick an image via that link, but if you didn't, or if you did and them clicked "Remove Background Image", you got a rotating collection of Google-selected images. The intent was to do this for a day to publicize this exciting new feature.
By the middle of the day they turned it off. They say because a bug made their explanatory link disappear for some users. (I saw it) I suspect the real reason was more to do with "turn off Google background image" being in their top-ten searches for the day.
The page first loads the search box, and nothing else. Everything else is added via AJAX after the fact, and if you're fast enough you can type a search and submit it before the other decorations ever come down.
Not true! The way they implemented the backgrounds, they come in near instantly.
I really noticed it, because I was folding yesterday. It took almost 8 seconds for those bloody things to fade into view.
I'd be quite happy to never see the "Change background image" option again.