Google recently conducted an experiment on their homepage, where the plain white background was replaced with a variety of colorful displays. While the experiment was designed to go on for 24 hours, it ultimately ended up being pulled early.
“Last week, we launched the ability to set an image of users choosing as the background for the Google homepage,” writes Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience. “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.”
For a company built so meticulously on research and consumer experience, this change was not subtle and highly unexpected. “They’ve never done anything like this,” said Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. “That was the most dramatic change to the Google home page ever, for that many people, without any warning.”
The lack of an active opt-out was surprising and “remove google background” was one of Google’s top 10 searches during the experiment. “I have no doubt they found out fairly quickly that they weren’t pleasing a significant number of their users,” added Sullivan.
Source: San Jose Mercury News
