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Google’s Forced Background Image – How to Remove, or Bypass

This morning I went to Google and found this weird computer generated picture showing up. Actually the first thing I noticed is that the Google text was grayed out. Also it look several seconds longer to load.

I was confused because I did not set a background picture. I like the simple interface that loads quickly. I avoid Yahoo, or Bing for that reason.

I found not apparent way to remove that ugly picture. I put up with changing of the Google sign from time to time. That doesn’t effect load time and makes it somewhat interesting, or notifies me about events that I wouldn’t normally know about. But this is just a PR fiasco.

So I started searching on how to remove it. Some ideas that I got:

- Set the background to gray. You could select white too but that makes the surrounding text blurry looking – not too pleasant to look at.This can be done by clicking on the “change background image” button on the bottom left of the page and then go to editor’s pick and scroll all the way down. Even with this an extra file of 24kb size is getting downloaded (

- If you are using Firefox with Adblock plugin (highly recommended combination). Then you can block the background image.  To do this go to Google.com and then press Ctrl+Shift+V to open the blockable items.  Scroll down to where it reads something like this:  http://www.google.com/images/background/p13.jpg.
Now click on that item and press Enter. From the menu select to block http://www.google.com/images/background/*
Refresh the page and it will be gone. The bad news is that it turn the background white which causes the things around the search box look blurry. But at least it prevents the unnecessary website traffic.

- Use https://www.google.com this is the secure search version of Google, it works just the regular one but without all that crazy additions.

- Use the search box of your browser. In most set-ups the search box is located on the top right hand side, next to the address bar. If you enter your query here and press enter you’ll directly end up on the results page, bypassing the Google.com homepage. It’s actually the fastest way to get to the search results.  You might need to change the search provider to use Google (some toolbars and other software change this) – it still the best search engine around as far as results go.

I’m really hoping that Google managers hear the dissatisfied people and ends this ill-conceived experiment on Google users before the day is over.

It just makes absolutely no sense. Why would they want more, unnecessary traffic on their servers and loose the big advantage that they have over the competitors – which is the simple, no-frills user interface.

Google, please do a survey on what people want before making changes!!

—-

Update: Google did hear the feedback and by the end of the day the forced background image operation was shut down and the Google home page went back to normal. Thank God!

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