Google has always encouraged competition and the new options will certainly help Yahoo and Microsoft increase their market share. "We had a bug recently where we put a malware statement out for users, and in that time, Yahoo! searches gained very, very quickly. It looks like people will move very quickly from one search engine to another, for any number of reasons," explained Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
The main goal of the new features is to accelerate the innovation in search and to add variety to Google's monotonous homepage. Since the competition will be one click away, even the users who believed that Google is synonymous with web search will discover two alternative search engines.
To keep the number of words from the homepage constant, Marissa Mayer decided to remove the word "programs" from "advertising programs", a change that makes Google's homepage load 0.1415% faster in Google Chrome.
The new homepage will be slowly rolled out in the next hours to a small number of users from Santa Clara and King County. Apparently, some Yahoo engineers already found about the tests and they started to prevent the new users from going back to Google by displaying a peculiar message: "You could go to Google. Or you could stay here and get straight to your answers".