Google has listened to its critics of the background images that graced their home page. Now, the page that once donned a number of beautiful background images is back to white. The design leader at Google, Marissa Mayer, confirmed that the move was only a one day experiment.
There was reportedly supposed to be a disclaimer about the images not being permanent, but did not show for most users because of a bug on the web page.
The page reminded many users of Bing, which also uses background images for their search engine home page.
The move quickly made terms like “remove Google background,” and “remove Google background images” some of the most searched keywords on Google in the wake of the images going up.
Google has long been considered to be of great design because they have touted simplicity over complexity, where most online businesses and sites had chosen for the latter.
The move appeared to head in the opposite direction, and alarmed many of their users, including those users who had become accustomed to the regular white background that the site had become known for. Bing responded to the claims by basically calling Google a copycat on their Twitter. While the background images may have set Bing apart from the crowd, it appears that users have chosen Google for reasons other than their colorful background pictures.
Category: Tech
The pictures yesterday really made an impact on me… they were gorgeous! Definitely should be considered as a permanent thing.
A few people liked the background image. That’s fine. They can still choose to have it if they wish.
Some people wonder why anyone even has the right to complain about what a ‘free’ service does on their own website. The answer to that is that Google has customers who pay to have their links featured on the pages that come up as a result of user queries. If users don’t like the Google interface and use another search engine instead then the customers who are paying for Google advertising lose potential customers.
Other people ask what difference does it make since they only use Google from their browser’s toolbar and don’t even go to the Google home page anyway. The answer to that is many people have Google as their browser’s home page so that when they start their browser it loads quickly and efficiently to a simple and uncluttered but useful page. In today’s age of high speed internet this may not seem too important, but that is an elitist argument because the fact is that a lot of people worldwide still do use dialup, have older computers, or bandwith limitations, and anything which impedes their access to the web is a detriment.
Additionally it can be said that some people simply do not wish to be bombarded with clutter, junk, or unnecessary trivial capitalistic opportunism everywhere they go on the web. People have choices and can choose Yahoo for their homepage if they want to see localized weather, news, personalized horoscopes, and advertisements geared to their own history of purchasing preferences. But for many people Google has at least seemed to be a safe haven from that – until recently.
Finally, on the matter of choice, it is one thing to offer users a choice on personalizing their Google home page, but what Google has done recently has been to impose their own preferences on users without offering them a choice. The pacman doodle was a debacle because it imposed an unprofessional intrusion into the professional user’s experience. Many businesses thought it was a virus and scrambled to “fix” it. Imagine you are a business person talking to a potential client and you go to Google to look up something and all of a sudden the client hears the sounds of you playing pacman. That’s sure to gain the confidence of your new customer! NOT!
By imposing background images or interactive doodles on users without offering them a clear opportunity to opt out of those changes, Google seems to be saying “screw you, we know better, take it or leave it.” And many people, given that limited choice, will leave it.