Back in the early 90s, Greco’s marketing team asked the age-old question: “If you’re not eating square pizza, who’s eating your corners!?“

A variation on the same question came to mind this morning when looking at the Google.com search home page:

First, your version of the Google home page you see is likely different from what I see. I’m logged in to a Google account. I’m also in Canada. Who knows what else determines what Google shows me.

Notice the four corners of that screenshot. Year over year, they seem to be filling with a creeping set of links and features. There’s an inscrutable grid of nine squares, a circle with a bell in it, a links – more and more links.

To be fair, it’s still a relatively simple and clear page. The search is the obvious focus – something that’s not as easy to maintain as it may sound. The secondary focus seems to be showing how Google’s artificial intelligence efforts are helping people. OK.

Even with this relative austerity of interface elements, I can’t help but see these creeping links and features as metaphor for a muddying of focus with which any company operating at the scope and scale of Google must contend.

It’s also worth noting that almost every link on that page (About, Store, Images, Privacy, Advertising, etc.) all take you to different websites with completely different navigation and interface structures.

Oh, and at risk of being “that person”, I mostly use DuckDuckGo for search these days.