So I have to ask a question that seems to not be getting asked.
As you can see above the Google homepage now has an image background as the default. I went to Google this morning and without having opted to have them display a background picture for me I get one.
In fact if you click on the link in the lower left hand corner of their homepage your taken to a page to show you several options for images to be your background:
All good right?
Well I say no actually.
Bing, Microsoft’s popular search engine, has been using background images since day 1 to highlight on their homepage. In fact those images are so popular they have spawned websites and Windows 7 themes that feature those images:
- Bing Image Archive by Long Zheng
- Bing Windows 7 Themes from Microsoft
There is even instructions on how to use RSS as the basis of a Windows 7 Theme to grab the daily Bing picture and put it on your desktop – Get a Live-Updating Bing Wallpaper Windows 7 Theme.
So this feature of having a background photo on their website was a key Bing feature and now it is apparent that Google is duplicating the popularity of this and adding the feature to their homepage.
Anyone have an issue with that? Personally, I have not seen anything in my RSS feeds that would lead me to believe that there is an issue with them using the feature Bing established.
I think if the shoe was on the other foot and this was Microsoft copying a feature that another company was using then there would be an uproar. It has happened in the past when people thought Microsoft was copying others.
This is such a blatant use of Bing’s photo background idea and now it has become a default setting so that the image appears when you go to Google to use the search engine.
Just like Bing always has been.
I guess we can fall back on the old phrase of “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”.
What do you think?
