I love how "experiments" are now "how things used to be in the bad old days and people hated it and we won the search engine market partly because we didn't do that but uh maybe it's time to try again"
Things have changed a LOT . The vast majority of Google users never even see the home page since it's integrated into the address bar of all mainstream browsers. So I guess they might as well use it for something other than pure search.
