A brief thought on today's Google Experiment

[andrewducker]

Google have decided that for 24 hours they're going to display a massive image as the background of their main search page. You can, apparently, tweak this image to be anything you like. However, it's already caused a minor revolt amongst people on both my friends list and on a few tech sites I read.

I wonder if they're doing this so that when it goes away again there'll be a massive sigh of relief, and when people next visit Bing (Microsoft's search site, which _always_ looks like that) it'll cause flashbacks and people to recoil at the memory...

Comments

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Do people still visit the front page of sites like Google and Bing? Personally I always just use the search toolbar built into the browser (which is now pointing at Google's https sevice - a site they haven't inflicted the background image on btw). Clicking on your link out of curiosity was the first time I've seen the front page of Google in about 12 months.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Actually, no, I lie - I did go and play Pacman a couple of times, but I never use the front page for searching.

[simont]

I still go to the front page as the quickest route to unusual kinds of search (images, maps, groups etc).

[avatar.livejournal.com]

Work forces us to use IE 6.

[andrewducker]

Thankfully we've moved to IE7 now. Brrrrr.

[simont]

I idly wondered if the aim was to encourage more people to log in to personalised accounts on the Google website so they could individually track what you were searching for you could configure the image to go away.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

I can't remember the last time I went to the Google homepage. I use Chrome so anything typed into the omnibar that is not a URL is automatically searched for on Google.

But having had a look at the homepage today, I can't say I mind it. The photographs are nice and it didn't seem to delay the page loading in any way.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I use Bing as my default search engine at work - in some ways it's better than Google, in others it's weaker - and don't mind the image. But it is sized appropriately, usually pretty and/or interesting, and has relevant hotlinks.

Google appears just to have splurged a huge image of a flower.

[andrewducker]

You get a fairly random picture. Mine's changed at least twice so far.

I did hear the theory that they might be trying to get people to sign in to change the picture, thus making them more trackable :->

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

On a vaguely related note - there's one place where the background pics make all the difference when searching for weather reports and that's here :)

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

I don't get a picture. But there's a doodad for picking one.

This, like Firefox personas, I don't understand: why make the text and UI you care about harder to read?

[sneakingyoda.livejournal.com]

I... um... kinda like it. *happy smile* :D

[the-locster.livejournal.com]

Dear lord. Make it stop!