I was on that site for 5 minutes and I still have no idea what it's actually trying to do. Looks like they spent so much time on all the fancy crap that makes the page load take forever that they forgot they had a message they were trying to get out.
or maybe their intent was to bore me off their site because I'm not a journalist. In that case they did well!
you're missing a lot if you're into web design. of course, content is king and google fucked up big times by not having a proper fallback. but that parallax scrolling is the best I've seen so far https://www.google.com/ideas/products/digital-attack-map/
The parallax scrolling on that page is mediocre IMO.
It's unnoticeable when not using smooth scrolling (my personal default). Not a huge problem for a design feature to be unnoticeable though.
When smooth-scrolling using the middle mouse button on Chrome/Linux, it doesn't update dynamically as it scrolls; the background snaps into position when scrolling stops. In Firefox/Linux, it does update dynamically with middle mouse smooth scrolling, but jerkily. It's noticeably bad in both browsers.
Google outsources a lot of design and build work to external agencies. Especially for projects like this, which are sort-of side-projects and not really core Google functionality. Also, quite a lot of paid client work for YouTube is/was outsourced.
I used to work for one of these companies, and we built quite a few highish-profile sites for Google and YouTube. The quality of work done by this company varied wildly between excellent and utterly dismal. Project management interactions with the Google side were haphazard at best and chaotic and disruptive at worst. Requirements would constantly change, and the designs would be all over the place. I don't think one time we thought about accessibility. A number of the projects were death marches, and I worked on at least one huge failure, which fell over on a live TV show with millions of viewers.
TL;DR - just because it's on google.com doesn't mean it was designed or built by Google.
I remember fondly the days when Google web sites could be relied on to be usable, well-designed, and easy to read. The Nexus page has been a bit of a canary, every time a new phone was released it got worse and worse.
