Is that all they did? A skewed blacked out logo? I hardly saw it. I was hoping for something a little more dramatic rather than something I would pass off as a glitch on the internet.
I love the little hint of a letter sticking out. It reminds you what used to be there, but is now censored. Meanwhile, it also establishes a subtle metaphor: censorship just covers the problem up, rather than fixing it.
TBH I never visit the homepage anymore (I never see the cool logos people end up talking about; I start up with about:blank for performance). I just search straight from the address bar, and in that respect the small logo change in the search results doesn't seem very effective at making a statement. I assume enough other people still visit the homepage for it to matter, though?
I hate to generalise, but in my personal experience people that are somewhat less computer literate do indeed visit the homepage to search. I've seen my parents do it countless times, even though I told them searching from the address bar is possible. My guess is that precisely these people are less likely to know about SOPA and its implications.
It raises the question, would these people notice the logo change and would they even be bothered to check out what it means?
Hmmm that's a good point. I already know what I'm looking at, and the significance, so I'm not really in the target audience. I also don't live in the US, so I had to proxy through one of my servers to see what the effect was like. That brief exposure I had probably isn't quite the same as seeing it throughout the day, as Americans will.
Interesting, 3 downvotes. Anybody want to explain why my criticism is so invalid? Google is trying to sell a message and is doing it in a much more understated way than some others sites. Not that I think it would have been a wise idea to censor the entire site, like Wikipedia, but it's interesting to wonder about the effectiveness of the option they chose. Most of the people here are ultimately interested in selling someone something using technology, and here is a successful technology company trying to sell a message in a way that is worth examining.
They didn't link to a PDF originally, but the viewer they linked to was configured incorrectly. Rather than continue showing an error message, they replaced it with a direct link to the PDF. Hopefully they'll change it to something else at some point this morning.
My fellow Canadians and I should also be seeing this. We inevitably get Canadian-ized versions of all these American bills shoved down our throats, after they pass in the US, especially with the current government in power.
It looks like they've still got some kinks to iron out. On the Take Action page, I'm getting a server error on the right and when I try to open the PDF it goes to a Google Docs page that tells me I don't have permission.
A Google representative said "So tomorrow we will be joining many other tech companies to highlight this issue on our U.S. home page." (from the article)
Yes - when we go to Google.com, it redirects us automatically to google.ca. That being said, we can click "go to google.com" and it usually shows the US version.
My iGoogle home page is always buggy (sometimes it shows the gadgets I have chosen, but many times it does not, probably because I also use Ghostery). This evening it is showing the blacked-out Google logo sometimes when I reload it, but usually showing the normal iGoogle logo along with my chosen theme's background image.
AFTER EDIT: Like a lot of Chrome users, I normally do my Google searches directly from my URL bar. Sure enough, every results page shows the black-out over the Google logo. This too will get plenty of attention in the United States. But clicking the logo only shows me (in this case) my usual Google pull-downs to specialized Google locations like my Google+ page, Images (which doesn't have its logo blacked out), and so forth. The "Search" choice from the pull-down leads to a main Google search page with a very obvious black-out, which reveals mouse-over text saying "Tell Congress: Please don't censor the Web!"
I can't reach google.com in any way and that makes me feel like they don't want to let me know about anti-PIPA/SOPA protest. They are really making 2 internets.
Google decided it would be more beneficial (to tyhem, or to the cause) by just raising awareness and still providing the useful information the user wants.
Blackout -> User sees it once and goes to SearchEngineX, forgetting all about it.
Google's Way -> Raise awareness each time the user sees it as they won't go to a different Search Engine.
A full blackout works for wikipedia, because people probably don't know about any alternative - especially with their pages dominating search results. But with Google, most people know of Bing or Yahoo at the very least.
Even Wikipedia's blackout is not full, and quite easy to go around if you know magic tricks like disabling JavaScript or CSS in the browser. While commercial damage is likely a very important consideration to Google, another reason might be that shutting down Google completely would most likely result in damage to human health and/or loss of lives.
With Google changing their logo every couple of days, this statement carries much less impact than any other site's protest. I wish they changed something more than just the logo. I wouldn't be surprised if many users don't even notice.
http://i.imgur.com/JBf8B.jpg