At first, I wasn’t sure what was going on. I didn’t notice anything special about the Google homepage because I never actually visit it. I search via Chrome’s location bar. Curious, I jumped over to Google.com and was greated by a very pleasing background image in place of the standard plain white. Everything faded in, probably due to some Javascript magic. I was impressed. Apparently, many others were not. Many were appalled, even. The question is, why are people so upset?
To provide you with an extra bit of inspiration, we‘ve collaborated with several well-known artists, sculptors and photographers to create a gallery of background images you can use to personalize your Google homepage. Included in the collection are photographs of the works of Dale Chihuly, Jeff Koons, Tom Otterness, Polly Apfelbaum, Kengo Kuma (???), Kwon, Ki-soo (???) and Tord Boontje, as well as some incredible photos from Yann Arthus-Bertrand and National Geographic. We’ll be featuring these images as backgrounds on the Google homepage over the next 24 hours.
Not only can you choose from a nice selection of high-quality background images provided by Google, but you can also choose images from your Picasa account or upload one from your computer. You can also choose to have no image, reverting back to the simple white that many are used to.
Many of the reactions border on the ridiculous. Some complained that Google is trying to be more like Bing. There is actually some merit to this complaint in that Google also recently updated the page to add a sidebar, much like what Bing offers. Some have said this “Bingification” of Google could hurt their business, but I think keeping things fresh on the back-end is more important.
Tweets from those associated with Microsoft indicate that they are amused and somewhat flattered that Google has gone this route. Others seem to hint at privacy concerns given that the backgrounds are opt-out instead of opt-in, much like the recent Facebook privacy debacle. Still others complain that the page seems to load slower.
In any case, I kinda like the new background options. I rarely visit google.com anyway, and the backgrounds don’t show up on the search results pages. If you have Opera or Safari, you probably have no clue what happened as they don’t show up in those browsers. Are you going to go customize your search page, or do you prefer basic white?
via Google’s New Look: Why is Everybody So Upset? – PCWorld