Actually, I think they're pretty cool, but....

 

Google balls driving you nuts? Mystery homepage illustration sparks online debate

Published: Tuesday, September 07, 2010, 10:43 AM

Michael Norman, The Plain Dealer

 

So what's up with Google homepage and those exploding blue, red, green and yellow balls? The techno comedians who run the world's most popular search engine love to take note of holidays and other cultural milestones by creating playful animations on the Google homepage.

 

Most of the time, the event being celebrated is obvious, or at least explained. But not so this time. Mouse over the animation and the dang balls just keep morphing to and fro like a crazed collection of drunken atoms.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://www.cleveland.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2010/09/google_balls_driving_you_nuts.html

I don't see them on my page. I must not be Googly enough.

We were wondering about it too.  Usually they have a link to something explaining what the day is for special homepages, but not today......

I noticed it this morning. I've been using Bing all day instead.

I think it was just a showcase of HTML 5, particularly canvas elements, the development of which Google has been spearheading.  It's basically a replacement for Flash, that doesn't require a proprietary plugin of any kind, just a bit of HTML.  However, if their logo was any indication it has a ways to go.  The code itself was much more efficient than a Flash object, but it took a lot more processing power than Flash (at least from my experience).

^ Yeah, Google Ad-Sense is scarily accurate. The worst is in Gmail, it literally reads your email and gives you ads concerning whatever your email is about.

Google shows search results before I'm even done typing a search in! I love Google. It's insanely fast. I typed in "Jaeg" and it showed a map of Jaeger St. nearby!

^ Some might consider that creepy.

^ Some might consider that creepy.

 

I'm just as creepy. If you call my phone and I don't recognize it, I'm going to find out who you and your carrier are before I call you back. I embrace techology :)

I don't like Google Instant Search or whatever they call it.  The Autocomplete box was good enough.  It hardly saves any time when you're searching and often times causes odd behavior with the text box (like sometimes the autocomplete box doesn't go away after focus is lost and sometimes keystrokes are dropped).

 

I'm all for new, innovativr features, and Google is usually great for that.  But this feature causes problems and doesn't add hardly anything to the experience.

you can turn it off

Anything google lately seems to bring havoc to IE 8.  Even firefox seems a bit picky.  I've heard tons of people complain so it's not just me.  Google chrome their features work great....of course.