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Change in Google Search is killing it

Google’s latest update nearly cost it the very thing that fueled its success, going by reactions from users and the media.

Lance Ng

Published in

UX Collective

4 min readFeb 16, 2020

Google’s original user landing page, simple and clean — Source: Marco Verch on Flickr

I’m not feeling lucky, but I’m betting neither is Google. On January 14, 2020, Google changed the design of its search engine results and immediately got a huge backlash from both users and the media.

Barely 10 days later, it had to roll back this change in what TechCrunch described as “redesigning the redesign”.

Users hated it

Immediately after the change, Google’s own support forum was flooded with users crying, screaming and protesting. They threatened to ditch Google for other search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing.

User complaints on Google’s support forum on the new search results page — Source: Google Support Forum

One user pointed out a much larger issue Google faces being accused of…

“…this isn’t about a visual change to the browser, these are core fundamental changes to how the internet is used for information, and Google is acting as the gatekeeper, limiting information to peddle advertising…”

The giant that Google may be, it was indeed experimenting on very dangerous grounds.

Given the amount of attention being paid by regulators to fake news and manipulative propaganda being fed through the internet these days, making ads more indistinguishable from real search results is literally asking to be hung.

So what exactly did Google do?

Essentially, Google made just one change. It placed a URL link on top of each result and a brand favicon on the left next to it.

New search results makes ads more indistinguishable from actual results — Search results after the Jan 14th change

So what’s the problem?

The problem was, it took away the green box and font it previously used to differentiate ads from actual search results.

As one who uses GoogleAds for a large chunk of our marketing outreach, this article omits — likely unintentionally — that the hardest hit here aren’t those who, DANG IT!, have to back out of an ad they accidentally clicked, rather those of my ilk…

I would suggest trying startpage.com.

They appear to be pulling data from Google but not ads, so the results are very much like Google used to be quick and to the point.

There are other settings available that set them apart from Google that many might find useful.

My main problem with the change is that it places emphasis on the wrong thing (site url and breadcrumb?) instead of the page title. To me as a user it makes way more sense to see page name first and see if it looks relevant to me, then I can check the source…