Background on the home search page ? WTF Google ?

Today I went to Google (as I do most days) to search for some stuff, but today when I got there, I was greeted with a horrible looking background on the search. My very first thought was "Did I just go to Bing by mistake ?", then I looked closer at the page and realized it was indeed Google. Needless to say, I was incredibly pissed. Why did Google change their signature search page ? It was great the way it was ! That was specifically why I went to Google. If I wanted to use a search engine that looked like a piece of shit, I'd use Bing. In my mind, this is nothing short of an epic fail on Google's part. And apparently, I'm not alone in this feeling.