I went to my usual homepage this morning - google.co.uk and noticed that there was a garish background image. Apparently, google have decided that everyone needs a background image to their search page. I tried to change the background image, and there is a link at the bottom corner which says 'Change background image' - I clicked on it, and a box popped up with nothing in it but a flashing text cursor. The top of the box says 'Select a background image for your google homepage'. This appears for about 30 seconds, then I got redirected to a login screen - even though I was already logged in.

Patiently, I entered my password in the box, clicked 'sign in' and then was taken back to the search page (complete with random garish images again) but this time the popup box had a selection of equally bad background images to select.

I don't want a background image so I tried selecting 'white' from the editors picks section - this just made the home page look like this:

Getting better, but the text is hard to read and the logo is a bit dull.

I noticed after you have changed the background image, the link in the bottom left says "Remove background image" (its a bit hard to see when you have the white background on). The clickable area on this text is also odd, but thats another matter.

So when you click on 'remove background image' you would expect that this would remove the background image from your google search page yes? WRONG! it just flips back to the random garish image that you had before.

You'd have thought google would at least have tested out this 'feature' before rolling out to billions of people worldwide.

(In programming circles the word 'feature' is often used to refer to a bug that has unintended or unexpected effects. )

The easiest way to get rid of this background image is to go to either use the personalised google page - igoogle, or click on the link that says 'go to google.com'. If you need to use the .co.uk for montiroing UK based SEO services, then use igoogle, otherwise, you could use google.com but that search will put more emphasis on US based sites rather than UK. if you search for a dentist in birmingham using google.com rather than google.co.uk, you will find the results show dentists in Birmingham, Alabama and not hte west midlands (not what you want really is it?).

Hopefully google will either fix the option to remove the background image, or remove the facility all together.  I think it should really have been a opt-in service rather than a 'youre stuck with it mate' service.

Background images are the main reason that I dislike using the Bing search engine.