Google does a Bing, badly

One thing that I like about Google are their logos.

However, I feel that today they’ve taken it too far (and got it totally wrong) by taking what would appear to be a leaf out of Bing’s book and have gone for all out background imagery:

Now I’m all for a bit of creativity but Google have made their page almost unreadable whilst burning my retinas. You can change the background image if you want but for me it just doesn’t work.

What surprises me more is that when Google launched their new homepage last December, they explained:

“the vast majority of people who come to the Google homepage… are coming in order to search, and this clean, minimalist approach gives them just what they are looking for first and foremost.”

Seems like they have taken a step back to me.

For the record, here is Bing’s home page for today – nice use of imagery AND you the link text is legible.

Lovely stuff.