Google Introduces, Then Scraps, Bing-Style Background Images 466
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."
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a reason... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Google has lost their identity (Score:3, Insightful)
iGoogle (Score:5, Insightful)
You know something has gone seriously wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
You know something has gone seriously wrong in your company when your employees are ripping off Microsoft's ideas.
Re:Fire that marketroid! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
[...]
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 one (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:About time too! (Score:3, Insightful)
What? I thought it was because of the more relevant search results. Silly me.
Re:Google has lost their identity (Score:3, Insightful)
These are customizations that can be removed. I opted for adding one of my picasa pictures. I I liked it.
As for the "it's not like a desktop", it's to me a good indicator that they could be moving to Web Operating Systems, where you can add icons an launch applications from within your browser. Is that bad? Is that the way? I don't know, but while people complains about being good or not, it seems to me that at least they offer options, and they try to please people. so they can pick for themselves. Whether they like Bing style or the traditional or the iGoogle with gadgets.
On the other hand, I see more the background on Google's page than my own desktop wallpaper that it's usually covered with more than one window.
Re:Opera users didnt have a problem (Score:0, Insightful)
That's exactly why it was posted in plain text.
Re:Opera users didnt have a problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Google has lost their identity (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Thanks god. (Score:4, Insightful)
My guess about this one is that they don't want you to notice that you are almost always "logged in" into Google search if, for instance, you have a Youtube or Gmail account. With the fade-in, you don't really notice the "log out" option in the top-right corner.
I remember being very surprised to see that I was always searching in "authenticated" mode because I told Gmail to keep me logged in (btw, the option is checked by default so probably most users are).
I find it very frustrating that they decided to link all the accounts like this. I want to keep my search separated from my Youtube views/comments separated from my mail.
(of course: they can still deduce who you are without being officially authenticated, but that's another story)
Re:You know something has gone seriously wrong... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There is a reason... (Score:5, Insightful)
Put it this way: today's experiment was New Coke. When you're the number 1 brand, it's stupid to make your product taste more like the number 2 brand. I'm baffled why Google even tried this.
Re:I must be the only one (Score:5, Insightful)
Google's homepage is the dial tone of the internet.
Re:Opera users didnt have a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thanks god. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Resistance to change (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that so many users use the Google search box as an address bar [readwriteweb.com], I'm amazed that they manage to get as far as opening up their browser without accidentally electrocuting themselves.
Re:Thanks god. (Score:3, Insightful)
the clutter they have added is remaining logged in and making it difficult to tell at a glance.
Re:iGoogle (Score:3, Insightful)
That ugly search bar thing merely wastes screen space. I just type "g whatever" -- by default, the keyword is "google" but you can change it to just "g".
It's especially useful if you want to search for something else -- like, going on to a given bug entry (in Debian's BTS / your project's Mantis / whatever) can be done with just "bts 213361". You could do that with the search bar, yeah, but it requires several clicks every single time.
Re:I did (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:I still see the link (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
If it ain't broke don't fix it (Score:3, Insightful)
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 [faqs.org] 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?
Re:Thanks god. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:I still see the link (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Thanks god. (Score:2, Insightful)
Why the hell should a user have to bother with this?
Re:You know something has gone seriously wrong... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not here (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:I must be the only one (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I still see the link (Score:3, Insightful)
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.