Google Backgrounds – Copying Bing.com or Just Search Engine Evolution?

June 10, 2010 Website Strategy No Comments

10th June 2010 was the day that the Google page changed, introducing background images instead of there being the familiar blank space.   Who knows what was behind that decision but there are likely to be comparisons to Bing.com, who have been providing pretty pictures for some time now.   Are Google copying Bing?   Possibly (but with a customisation twist).  Are Google concerned about the might that Bing will likely become in the next couple of years?  Most probably, which could explain why they’re trying to make themselves look a bit more like them.

At first I thought that the move towards bringing in colour to the background may have some sort of environmental benefit (less energy used) but the great posting at http://hubpages.com/hub/How-much-power-do-we-save-if-GOOGLE-screen-turns-black-or-grey made me think otherwise (while also being quite educational about energy savings in general).

What interests me is the impact the Google backgrounds change will have on productivity.   Although there’s an argument that the introduction of colour backgrounds will have a slightly positive impact on energy usage, let’s look at the (slight) downside:

1. People will spend time on changing the background image to the range available, or may add their own background image.  This in itself will reduce productivity (multiply the few seconds to few minutes people play about with the background up by the millions of people likely to do it).

2. If going with the automatically changing images, people will naturally spend a bit longer just looking at the Google page, which is time wasted.

And in the name of balance, some possible positives from the Google backgrounds …

1. It could make Google look a bit cuddlier and not so corporate (giving people the option to change the backgrounds).

2. People who choose to put their own favourite images as their background are more likely to stay using Google because they like that image (in the same way that they’d like a screensaver image or wallpaper).

We do also have to ask the question: “What happens to the Google logo art?”  A pretty picture in the background is highly likely to clash with any Google logo art – more so if people use their own pictures as backgrounds.  So does this mean the end of the Google logo art that we’ve become so accustomed to or will people’s Google search pages end up being a clashing mess between logo art and background image?  

Apparently the Google home page will be back to normal tomorrow (11th June) and people will then have the option to select how they want it to be displayed.   It’s been about a year since Microsoft started the concept of a pretty background picture and now (however much they’d attempt to deny it) Google have copied it and added a bit more.   A year from now it’ll be interesting to see how much further things have moved on with how the search giants treat their home pages.