Tired of plain blank background of your favourite search engine – Google ? Now Google is coming out with a feature so that you’ll be allowed to customize your Google page by uploading and setting your picture as background for Google page.

The company announced on Wednesday that over a next few days this feature would come into effect. The limitation is that only US visitors will be able to implement it for now. Users will be able to drag photos from their computer or a Picasa library onto the home page. Though Google will roll out this feature for users outside US but it will be gradually taken forward.

Google has always believed to keep the homepage minimal. They removed all kinds of external links from the homepage as they thought best to remove all kinds of distractions while searching. It has allowed users to set up customized iGoogle pages, but has otherwise left the basic Google.com page alone other than the usual holiday doodles or occasional promotions for things like Chrome or the Nexus One. You can also easily switch between the classic look and the customized page.

This is policy shift for google who have always stuck with their plain look. They are opening up to competition. With Bing having a similar approach to a background picture, although not customized. Google have gone ahead to allow a customized image. It is yet to be seen how users react to this change.

[via : Google blog]