Did Google Just Jump the Shark?

In case you missed it, Google broke a cardinal rule of its famously clean white-space design Tuesday morning. For the first time, the company put an animated banner ad on its sacrosanct search homepage.

"The playground is open," the ad, for the Nexus 7 tablet, declares. And indeed it is -- the home page just became a playground for Google's legion of marketers. The question is, can it ever close again?

As my colleague Lauren Indvik pointed out earlier, Google has previously pushed the boundaries of its homepage design with tiny text ads.

Here is the ad for the Nexus One phone from 2010. It was relatively clean and unobtrusive. The text outweighed the icon.

It fit into t…
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