Google's background image experiment failed miserably

Instead of the originally planned 24 hour marathon of background images on Google's homepage, they opted for just a few. When the test started, there was some serious backlash almost immediately. Due to that, Google decided that it's probably best to just pull the plug.

The It was probably a combination of upset users, and the fact that a bug prevented some users from reverting back to vanilla Google.

I was a bit surprised that Google decided to do this at all though -- can it be that they are feeling some kind of pressure from Bing? I would love to think that's not the case, but how else would you explain this?

Google used to be a company that was completely anal about how many words appeared on the homepage. Over the last year, the homepage, and result pages have been the recipients of major UI changes -- strange if you ask me.

What do you think of todays homepage experiment?