Google has, for almost the whole of October, been experimenting with a new minimalist homepage, which gets rid of everything but the Google logo and the search box. Not everyone will have yet seen the test site though many have. The level of minimalism and wording on display seems to have varied considerably. But what, ultimately, is the point? Is this a pointless exercise that is confusing users?

Google, as a company, has an incredible knack of generating stories out of everything it does. It recently celebrated H.G. Wells’ birthday with a couple of intriguing doodles and the level of interest and response was phenomenal. And now it is playing with the format of its homepage and eliciting a similar level of interest. A level of interest other companies would kill for (and probably have).

TechCrunch first reported on the minimalist homepage messing on Oct. 5. But at that time only a very select band were seeing the new homepage. In its first form, the Google homepage was purely the logo and the search box, with the other, normal features and links only appearing when the cursor was moved around the page.

Since then, a lot more people have started seeing the new homepage and the level of tinkering has been adjusted over the last three weeks. For a time, there was a line saying, “This space intentionally left blank” under the search box. No doubt placed there to answer an inordinate number of queries received as to why everything had suddenly disappeared.

However, this message being present ruined the whole effect somewhat and also rendered it utterly pointless. So in recent days this line has changed to, “Press enter to search” which is probably even worse. This is like saying, “Oi stupid, I know the button of old has disappeared but you now just have to press enter instead… you idiot.”

Google is likely to carry on experimenting until it finds a happy medium which pleases the majority of people while maintaining its desire for clean lines and a lack of mess. Until then, we’re all likely to see different versions of the Google homepage, and some of us are going to get confused by the enforced changes. Which makes me wonder if it’s all a little pointless to begin with.

Why try and fix something that isn’t broken?

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Entry was posted on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 10:52 pm under Google, Internet, Opinion.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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