Google's homepage at google.com has been changed: the search engine leader has decided that a privacy link, which leads to the company's straightforward Privacy Center, should be fit somewhere on its first page. But there was also the company policy of keeping things neat and thin, with a fixed word count of 28 words on the homepage.

What could then be removed to make room for the "Privacy" word and link? Looking around, there was this one word that seemed superfluous: Google, in the copyright notice at the bottom of the search homepage. Consequently, the "©2008 Google" was changed into "©2008 Privacy," with the Privacy hyperlinked to www.google.com/intl/en/privacy.html

Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience at Google, explained the whole word count thing on a company blog. Apparently they got into the whole "keep it thin" thing after a user kept sending cryptic emails which had a number as subject. The messages were like "61, getting a bit heavy, aren't we?" Finally, the mystery was cracked and Mayer realized that the person was talking about the number of words on the Google homepage, which were only 13 when it was launched back in 1999.

What Marissa Mayer doesn't mention is that privacy organizations wrote to Google CEO Eric Schmidt last month requesting such as change. It appears that California law requires that all pages have a privacy link on their homepage.

The petition was signed by representatives from Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, the World Privacy Forum, Consumer Action, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the Consumer Federation of California.

At first, Google said its privacy policy was easily accessible to users, and available to anyone through the “About Google” link. Furthermore, Google says that by adding it, it would change the purposely plain home page. According to California’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 2003, all companies need to put their privacy policy on their home page. However, Google did not completely ignore the law, which also states that the privacy policy can also be placed where a reasonable person would notice it.

The company said last month that anyone could simply type the words “Google privacy policy” and the search engine will find the page for them. However, it seems that Google wanted to play it safe and comply with the request in a more straightforward way.