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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.
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.
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
You look at the desktop a lot? I can barely even remember what my desktop background is. I see it for about 10 seconds after a very rare reboot, while I'm waiting for various maximized applications to start.
Random and weird software I've written.
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.
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.