The rotating images designed to show off a new feature that lets users personalize their wallpaper originally were intended to be on display on the Google.com homepages of users around the world for 24 hours.<\/p>\n
But Google returned to its plain white background prematurely because many users believed the change was permanent.<\/p>\n
“We had planned to run an explanation of the showcase alongside it in the form of a link on our homepage,” Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president for search products and user experience, said in a blog post.<\/p>\n
“Due to a bug, the explanatory link did not appear for most users,” she said. “As a result, many people thought we had permanently changed our homepage, so we decided to stop today’s series early.”<\/p>\n
Visitors to Google.com on Thursday morning were greeted with photos from National Geographic and Yann Arthus-Bertrand and images of the works of Dale Chihuly, Jeff Koons, Tom Otterness, Polly Apfelbaum, Kengo Kuma, Kwon, Ki-soo and Tord Boontje.<\/p>\n
Users who wanted to return to the “classic” Google white background found that they were unable to do so, however, and in addition were being forced to create a Google account to add a new image.<\/p>\n
“Remove Google background” was one of the top 10 “hot searches” on Google itself on Thursday, and criticism of the background images was flying fast and furious on Twitter.<\/p>\n
Some Twitter users accused Google of copying Microsoft’s search engine Bing, which has featured a different background image every day since it launched in June, and the US software giant itself poked fun at its rival.<\/p>\n
Microsoft Europe, in a message on its Twitter feed @MSEurope, said: “We’ve lost a background image, if found please return to Bing.com.”<\/p>\n
“Hey Google, if I wanted a background image I would have gone to Bing,” wrote Twitter user @jcready.<\/p>\n
“A sad day for Googlers. Google has added — nay, forced – a background image on us,” wrote @michaeltrollan.<\/p>\n
“Oh Google what have you done! Why?!?” wrote @PaulOBrien.<\/p>\n
Google has steadfastly refused offers to put outside advertising on the homepage featuring its search box in a bid to maintain its spare look, and Thursday’s move surprised a number of observers of the Internet giant.<\/p>\n
Mike Elgan, writing at IT World.com, compared it to Coca-Cola’s ill-fated 1985 decision to revise its famous formula, to the ire of millions of customers who said they preferred the taste of the original soft drink.<\/p>\n
“Today’s Bing-wanna-be stunt feels like the introduction of ‘New Coke,'” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Google spruced up its homepage with images from artists, sculptors and photographers on Thursday, but dropped the feature after drawing the ire of users clamoring for the normally blank background.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13015"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13015\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}