Google ended its experiment to put a picture on its front page – whether you wanted one or not – only 14 hours into its 24-hour experiment, blaming the decision on a bug which meant that an explanatory link wasn't included.
The problem was caused when it added a World Cup doodle - which of course would look like a mess of pottage if you had chosen a picture for your background.
Really, Google? A bug meant you didn't include a link? And you didn't spot that during testing? Mmm.
In the blogpost originally posted to explain the use of the image, an update by Marissa Mayer, the head of search products and user experience, now notes:
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.
Judging by the number (and negative attitude) of the comments that we saw on our own post, and the fact that for some time "remove google background image" was appearing on Google Trends, this looks like an experiment that just went wrong. Either that, or as Simon Jary suggests over at PC Advisor, it was a means of making people think, when they went to look at Microsoft's Bing, that it was just horrible.
Either way, Google has probably got a few more people to sign up with it (to change the awful images), and perhaps made them think Bing isn't the thing. Or it has driven them into the arms of Safari or Opera, which didn't display the image for us. (Thankfully.) Chalk it up to experience, Marissa. And never do it again.
