Google

Goodbye Google Custom Home Pages With Personal Backgrounds

Google Home Page Custom

Over two years ago, Google enabled users to customize the Google home page with their own image or graphics from a library of images. But now that feature is going away.

This is coming to a surprise for many Google users because Google quietly announced this news late on a Friday afternoon saying:

Classic Plus is a Google Search feature that lets people upload or select images to use as a background on Google.com. Users won’t be able to upload new pictures starting from October 16, and we’ll turn the service off in November 2012. You’ll continue to have access to any images you’ve uploaded.

Google has more details about this feature going away over here.

Many users are simply not happy. If you take a look at the Google Web Search Help forum, you will see hundreds of complaints from Google users. Googlers are leading them to this thread with hundreds of complaints.

Explore more on

Gmail Google Google Search User interface
Add Search Engine Land as a preferred source on Google

Editorial disclosure

Search Engine Land is owned by Semrush. We remain committed to providing high-quality coverage of marketing topics. Unless otherwise noted, this page’s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.

About the author

Barry Schwartz
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.