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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?
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
You know something has gone seriously wrong in your company when your employees are ripping off Microsoft's ideas.
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
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.
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.
What? I thought it was because of the more relevant search results. Silly me.
Clever signature text goes here.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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!