Google Stunt Pulled Early

To promote the customizable Google Search page option, "now available internationally," Google added photographs to its main portal.

While the company often plays with the Google logo on the page, this went a bit too far for many users, with even Google Trends pointing out that lots and lots of users were trying to turn it off.

Turned out you had to find the plain white background option in order to turn it off.

It was also reason for laughs from Microsoft, which has had colorful photos on its Bing search engine since it debuted.

Microsoft Europe joked on Twitter, "We’ve lost a background image, if found please return to bing.com."

So Google decided to kill the promotion early.

"There was supposed to be a link explaining what was going on (only one day, etc.), due to a bug it wasn't showing," Google executive Marissa Mayer explained.

Jackson West can't remember the last time he actually used the Google search page.