http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/what-comes-next-in-this-series-13-33-53.html
Until today, Google’s homepage hasn’t had a link to their privacy policy. (I can’t remember where I read this but I think their argument was that more links hurt the user experience, and that if you want it you can Google for it.) Privacy groups have been complaining about this however, and according to this Marissa Mayer blog post, Sergey and Larry finally agreed that the homepage could link to the privacy policy—but only if the total word count didn’t change. So they took away the word “Google” from the footer and replaced it with a link to the privacy policy. (Includes the story about the angry user who sent mysterious emails consisting of a single number (the number of words on the homepage) to Google every time it changed.)