Where ads used to be highlighted in green at the top of search results, the change made it so they were only differentiated by a little “Ad” icon. It’s easy to confuse an ad for something else when skimming through search results – which one has to assume was the goal. As noted by Alex Hern of the Guardian, SearchEngineLand has a great synopsis of the changes Google has implemented over years.
— hern (@alexhern) January 23, 2020 It’s pretty clear the company has slowly but surely made its ads sneakier, and the gamble appears to be paying off with early improvements in ad traffic. But after the initial backlash, Google says it’s experimenting with a variety of ways to display search results:
— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) January 24, 2020 As The Verge points out one of these tests involves removing the favicons altogether, making Google Search results just a plain collection of blue links again. If it ain’t broke…
