Fourteen hours into a 24-hour experiment with background imagery, Google's homepage is once again stark white.
Design guru Marissa Mayer confirmed that Google was ending the experiment early due to what she called a "bug". The bug erased a link underneath the search bar on google.com that explained why Google's famously spartan home page had taken on a colourful look. Apparently many searchers on Thursday morning missed the company's blog post on Wednesday, and were confused and annoyed at the change, turning "remove google background" into the seventh-most-popular search on Google on Thursday.
Last week Google announced that it would begin providing its users with the option of setting their own background image behind the home page, but last night it forced an image to appear for all users signed into a Google account to highlight the feature. That didn't sit well with many grown used to Google's clean white design, especially when Google's explanation of why it was forcing this look vanished from the homepage.
For more on this story, see Google kills background images on home page on CNET News.
