Following yesterday's debarcle with the background image on the google search home page, Google pulled the feature off the site after only 14 hours. The invasion of colour in the home page of Google was deeply unpopular and promoted a storm of protests from online users who were unable to remove the background image from the google homepage. The phrase 'google background' was the 7th most popular search phrase yesterday.

Hopefully, google will learn from these lessons and not try anything like it again.

The whole reason google became the most popular search engine on the planet is because of the minimalist design. Back in the days of 28k modems, the major search engines like Yahoo, ASK and Netscape all had homepages with a mass clutter of separate boxes of mostly useless information and it generally took about 20-30 seconds just to download the homepage before you can start using the serach box. For some reason, Yahoo still thinks that when you want to use a search engine, you need to have loads of stories, links and 'features' on the page to enhance the experience. Back in 1995, two years before google started, I argued with my employer that a search engine should be just that, an engine to search for stuff, and if you could create one that had no images on the page, no extranious information and just a basic text box and search button, you would capture the market. They didn't see the commercial benefit in doing this. I wish I had the venture capital to make one back then.

Now, google is becoming gradually more and more cluttered up. We no longer have to worry so much about the time it takes to download the home page since most people have 500kbs + connections, but the visual effect of all the extra stuff makes the search engine less appealing. If you add to this a massive in-your-face image in the background, we are getting back to the bad of days of 'search portals'