This article talks about Marissa Mayer's (Google homepage "keeper") recent talk at an AIGA conference and her admittance that a majority of design decisions at Google are made based on statistical data. Nothing rolls out to the masses without being tested, thoroughly, on smaller pools of people.

None of this is new information or really even that surprising but isn't it just a geekier form of Design by Committee? I'm all for user testing and creating the most effective UI but if you're unable to roll something out that a large percentage of people aren't into then you're also unable to take any risk. I'm fine with Google's clean / sparse look (and I don't just mean the homepage, I mean the majority of their products) but it really seems like there is a predominant lack of design.

There's something very interesting when comparing the homepages of Yahoo, Bing and Google and considering that Google is unwilling to change something without massive amounts of statistical data behind it being the "right" choice. Does this strip them of their identity or establish it?