At least four three, apparently.
This morning, Google announced that they made an exciting ‘new feature’ available in the form of Bing-esque background images to the classic, uncluttered homepage we’ve grown to love. As Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience put it:
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… Of course, since we want your Google homepage to be personal to you, you can still choose an image or photo from your computer or your own Picasa Web Album.
Gee, thanks.
I know it’s not a big deal, but I found the images to be a distraction so I wanted to turn them off. But there was no ‘off button’, nor was there any information on Google’s support page, or blog post about how to go back to normal. Comments on the blog post also appear to be turned off, so you can’t even pose the question.
So onto Twitter to where I was joined by Stephen Davies, and Paul Borge and Tarryn Blackwood as we fumbled around awkwardly trying to get to the bottom of things.
Click for full, awkward conversation
UPDATE: Tarryn Blackwood likes Google background images. Sigh.
The fix is rather simple, according to Mashable:
You can also choose the color white as the background, available from Google’s editorial choice of images. Most importantly, Google’s backgrounds will be rotated only today, after which (we hope) all will be restored to normal, and users will be able to set a custom homepage only if they choose to.
So my search background is now white, after having selected white background in the gallery which according to Marissa Mayer is the ‘opt out.’
The annoying thing is that this ‘opt out’ is not immediately obvious. And I don’t think I’m alone in thinking so. The Mashable post about how to turn the images off has been Retweeted over 800 times… and it was only posted an about an hour ago.
This all reminds me a bit about when Buzz was first introduced, amidst terrible privacy failures and unclear directions as to how to turn it off. This is a smaller scale annoyance, but a bit of a FAIL for Google nonetheless.
But I’m going to stop right there, I find myself sounding a lot like this:
