Usually, when I go to http://gmail.com, I get a login page. But sometimes, I get a page that tells me about Gmail’s features and invites me to sign up (with a smaller link to a login page).[1] I get both pages served to me in a "new" browser (viz, using Firefox's private-browsing mode without having logged in to Google in that session), in the same browser on the same machine as one another. What determines which page I get?
[1] I can't reproduce the latter at the moment. Therefore, I can't provide interestingly contrastive URLs/screenshots of both the pages — so I'm providing a URL/screenshot of neither.
Best Answer
Google likes to do experiments, so one thing that determines what do a user see when he goes to a Google URL depends on if Google is running an experiment on that URL.
Also, Google like to do campaigns, so if a user meet the conditions to be considered part of the current campaign audience he could be redirect to the campaing landing page like https://www.gmail.com/intl/en_us/mail/help/about.html