I was about to post this. Alienate users for 1 day by showing them how crap backgrounds can be, everyone hates it (even if just on principle) and then if they ever visit Bing they'll say 'this is like the day that Google went crap', negative feelings all round towards it.

It is brilliant.

It sounds like maybe you're right. When I saw this on the Google home page the first thing I did was move my mouse about to look for the 'disable background image' link. Then I went into my Search Settings. Then I thought it must be a joke. Not April. Google, again, against what I wanted, hiding the useful links until you move your mouse because users found them "distracting", are contradicting themselves 100% here. That is, if they really do do user testing, and weren't just bullshitting. Maybe they did that user testing with live users and I just wasn't online at that time. Maybe this is the same thing. They test it for a day to see people's reactions. That's good science but treating your users shittily if they can't opt out. So I'm wondering if maybe it is a coke classic.

>but it takes about an extra second to load the page now, so I removed it

You can search before the picture loads.

Yes, but our brain likes to wait for something to complete, especially if it takes less than 3 seconds.

On the web especially, I've been conditioned not to start typing into boxes until the page fully finishes loading, because onload js stuff often repositions the cursor, which is annoying to have happen in the middle of typing something.