Those
following Microsoft
Europe's Twitter account may have spotted this piece of
snarkiness which aired this morning: "We've lost our background
image, if found please return to bing.com ;)"
Peter Bale,
Executive Producer of MSN UK, added,
"How intriguing to see friends at Google borrowing the Bing
homepage #photography idea."
The tweets were referring to
Google's ill-fated attempt to introduce background images to its
famously spartan page. Google had announced
last week that it was adding the ability to have a custom
homepage image as part of its search page revamp, which included a
page-look makeover and new Caffeine indexing engine.
On
Wednesday night, though, it made the curious decision to force users
with compatible browsers signed into a Google account to use the
background images. A blog
on the topic was largely missed by the company's users.
To make matters worse, according
to Google Designer Marissa Mayer, a "bug" deleted
the link to the blog post explaining the colorful images.
By
mid-day, the seventh
most popular topic on Google was "remove google
background". Embarrassed, Google pulled the plug on the default backgrounds after only 14 hours of action. It's unclear whether the
ability to have custom search-page images will be making a return at
some point.
For Microsoft it was a rare opportunity to gloat.
According to market researcher firm Net Applications, Microsoft's
Bing search engine holds only
3.24 percent of the market, versus Google's 84.8 percent.
However, Microsoft did enjoy a good month in may, with both Bing and
partner Yahoo reversing their slide in market share and actually
posting small gains.
Updated: June 11, 2010, 12:52 p.m.-
It appears that the option to set your background image is now restored. It disappeared for us as of late yesterday and popped up on the bottom left hand side of the screen as of around 11 a.m. (Note: We were logged in our Google account during this time period.)
The crucial difference is that Google is no longer enabling a background image by default, for those who haven't opted in to the setting.
