Helvensteijn.com

Today, in San Francisco an event called “Lights Out San Francisco” takes place. Basically, everyone there is asked to turn off al their lights except for one compact fluorescent lamp between 20:00 and 21:00 hours tonight, to raise awareness of the need to reduce energy consumption.

Google supports this initiative by serving a black home page to people living in the San Francisco Bay area.

Google users in the San Francisco Bay Area will notice today that we “turned the lights out” on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a citywide energy conservation event called Lights Out San Francisco.

http://www.google.com/lightsoutsf/

Well, I don’t live anywhere near San Francisco, but I am treated with a (rather ugly) black Google home page:

Google front page when the lights are out

So far nothing really special. But apparently, everyone else I’ve asked gets the standard white home page. I haven’t pulled off any tricks, I’m not connecting though a proxy, and my IP address is a Dutch one. In fact, Google redirects me to www.google.nl when I visit www.google.com if I don’t turn that off manually (by visiting www.google.com/ncr once). So Google actually knows my IP address is a Dutch one. Everyone else with a Dutch IP seems to get the white home page.

Weird.

A few days ago, I noticed that Google’s front page has had a facelift. Upon futher examining this, it seems than only google.com has been updated. Localized Google front pages (like google.nl or google.be) seem to still use the old layout.

For those using a localized version of Google, this is what google.com looks like now:”

Google front page

Or you could go to google.com/ncr to see it yourself (this link prevents redirecting to your localized Google version).