Interesting, 3 downvotes. Anybody want to explain why my criticism is so invalid? Google is trying to sell a message and is doing it in a much more understated way than some others sites. Not that I think it would have been a wise idea to censor the entire site, like Wikipedia, but it's interesting to wonder about the effectiveness of the option they chose. Most of the people here are ultimately interested in selling someone something using technology, and here is a successful technology company trying to sell a message in a way that is worth examining.

I hate to generalise, but in my personal experience people that are somewhat less computer literate do indeed visit the homepage to search. I've seen my parents do it countless times, even though I told them searching from the address bar is possible. My guess is that precisely these people are less likely to know about SOPA and its implications.

It raises the question, would these people notice the logo change and would they even be bothered to check out what it means?

Go to the comments of this article and copy-paste the javascript: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/11/how-to-try-googles-...

Actually I miss the standard dark skinny bar, now it takes one click more to go to my email.

I got mine when I switched Gmail to the new look and started using Google+ but maybe it was just a coincidence.