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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."
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.
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.
That's a pretty false dichotomy. Yes, the majority of people do seem to like Google better than they like Bing, Yahoo etc. But that doesn't mean all those people think everything Google does is perfect and they never want anything changed or have any new features added. Ultimately, if Google took your advice and search development became completely stagnant, then eventually the other search providers would improve over time and overtake Google.
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.
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Haha, yeah, I'm sure MS if gloating about how Google copied them. On the other hand, the response to the 'Bing' flavored Google was overwhelmingly negative, which can't make them feel too good. Especially since a lot of the comments that I saw were along the lines of "If I wanted this crap I would go use Bing".
Funnily enough email addresses with the word spam on them get no spam at all, the word is stripped by pretty much every sniffer out there :)
I can't really give a rational reason, but I like going to the google page instead of using the search field.. (except when the horrid picture was there). I don't know, I guess part of it is that I'm used to it, and google loading also just shows me that my net connection is working. (At home I have to wireless routers, one as a bridge to another, for Tivos and my laptop -- I usually use the laptop connected to the other router to connect to the local Tivos.)
Yeah, they should make a 20MB video of that person getting an ass kicking the new default background on Google!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I'll have to check the forums to see if anyone has commented on the ominous warning presented when you try to select a photo:
"Only select images that you have confirmed that you have the license to use."
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.