Last month, we had some fun with Google's explanation of their recent redesign of search results, but it looks like Google isn't quite done yet with not copying Bing.
In their quest to make their search engine sexier and more appealing to the fickle masses, Google's now begun to let users add a background image of their choosing to the main search landing page. Is this cool? Yes. Is it copying Bing? We'll let you decide, but note that the picture above is a screenshot of Bing's landing page uploaded to Picasa and set as my Google Search background image. Google's suggestion that it only looks vaguely familiar only makes it funnier. (Click image for full size.)
And that's where the militant commenters will start saying that it's not copying, since Google lets the users pick their own backgrounds, while Bing just force-feeds fake Feng Shui. As much as I'm tempted to agree with them, I end up remembering the kids in school who would copy your answer in a test, and then expand on it and make it even better than yours. You know the type.
Whether it's obvious copying or not isn't all that important anyway. It's actually a pretty nice little feature; you can choose any image you want so long as it's at least 800x600 in size, and you simply pick from whatever's sitting in your Picasa account. Then, whenever you hit up Google's landing page, the image fades into opacity in the background so it doesn't slow down your searching.
They're still rolling the feature out at the moment, and somewhat slowly at that, so you may not see the option to add a background image for a few days.
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