Google changes layout of mobile Google Search pages
Google revealed a change to its mobile search results pages yesterday that is already being rolled out to all users of the search engine.
Google Search is the world's most popular search engine and while it lags behind in some regions, it dominates most.
The design refresh of the mobile search results pages aims to better guide customers "through the information available on the web". Google notes in the announcement that the new design puts a "website's branding [..] front and center" so that customers "better understand where the information is coming from".
Site names and icons are displayed on top of the page or site title in the new design. Previously, each entry started with the page title followed by the site icon and (part of its) URL. Now, entries start with the icon and URL, and then the actual page title.
Google believes that the new design makes it easier to scan the results page. Advertisement uses the same format but instead of an icon Ad is shown in its place.
It is hard to say if that makes it harder to spot advertisement; the old design draw borders around Ad which helped distinguish it from regular content. I'd say ads blend in even better than before, and that will surely drive more clicks to them.
Depending on your query, you may get several pages worth of advertisement and other Google-powered features before the first organic search result. The company plans to put even more features and services (that it controls) on search results pages in the future.
As we continue to make new content formats and useful actions available—from buying movie tickets to playing podcasts—this new design allows us to add more action buttons and helpful previews to search results cards [..]
Google is still not honoring its quality guidelines when it comes to advertisement (which it enforces on sites), and the injection of even more Google-powered snippets will will keep Internet users even longer on Google's properties.
If you don't like where this is heading, try Startpage Search or DuckDuckGo instead.
Tip: check out these five tips to get the most out of Startpage.
Now You: What is your take on the redesign? More money into Google's pockets, more control, and more feature snippets, or beneficial to users (in short or long run)?
Do NOT Like new format ?
I hate it…how do I change it back!!!!
Hate this new layout, will be changing search engine til it’s back to normal. It just driving me nuts.
Awful. Have always preferred google, not any more.
I have this new design in Opera browser on desktop pc with windows 8. In Chrome and firefox is not like that. Is horrible, im trying go back to the old design but i didnt find yet. With the old design i can know with a quick view which websites have the information that i need and which are fake seeing the url in green.
Yup…all of a sudden a couple of days ago the whole format and look of the result page on Google search on my iPad changed for the worse! Suddenly the visual appearance got really messy and most of the results are useless ads. I used Google multiple, like 20-30 times per day to find out information, it was a wonderful tool to find out tons of stuff….now its become completely useless. Bye bye Google.
I shall now do everything I can to leave google. I hate it. Can’t see anything.
New search layout on Google is visually distracting and yields poor search results. The search results have been progressively spun towards Googles targets not the particular results I seek. We are losing a wonderful learning tool in service to a barage of marketing
Chris Cosrington wrote on June 11 2019
New search layout on Google is visually distracting and yields poor search results. The search results have been progressively spun towards Googles targets not the particular results I seek. We are losing a wonderful learning tool in service to a barage of marketing
I believe Chris’s comment was on point. End Users need search results that are timely and specific to the information they are seeking. This new layout encroaches on a precious commodity; an individual’s time. Google will lose market share.
Horrible to use. Hate it!
I hate it and switched to DuckDuckGo today. I want real search results and not 2 pages of adverts and another 2 pages of irrelevant data before I find a good result for my search. Bye bye Google!
Terrible new design. It was fine as it was. I have just sent my thoughts to Google. Suggest everyone else does.
Goggles new format sucks
I don’t know what Google was thinking … they had everybody beat, and they just blew it, big time … the new format looks like a mimeograph from the 1950s … who needs that … let’s go back to the way it was when you could see most possibilities in your search instantaneously … Google you made a mistake!
I hate it and that’s why I’m here.
Videos, ads, those big tiles full of useless information… For a mobile screen.
Were they high when then decided that at Google?
If they don’t roll it back or at least let the possibly to use the former layout I will use something else.
Do not like the new format.
I hate it..just brings up adverts
How do we undo it? I hate it.
No option in Chrome. Maybe in Firefox with an extension, but I did not check.
I have a 27 inch widescreen monitor, and now Google thinks they can force me to use the center 4 or 5 inches of it while the rest is all blank white screen? No thanks…I’m off to Bing or Yahoo or one of the others where I can actually *use* the screen real estate I paid for.
I am sure Google had made this change to better their ad revenue. Googles search results have been sucking more and more. Never get any thing you search for, you only get what google wants you to see. Advertising has gotten way out of hand. Soon google search will be worthless- will be only ads and nothing more.
Billions of people who use google search disagree with you. But no, they are wrong and you know the truth haha.
When I first saw it, I immediately felt like it took me longer to find a result I wanted.
…aaaaaand my hatred for all things google grows even deeper.
Thanks a lot! We all know that switching layouts every few months is the best way to “make it easier to scan the results page”. And why not throw some more whitespace in there, it’s not like it’s bothersome to have to scroll past your “SLEEK DESIGN” to get where I want. /s
“you may get several pages worth of advertisement”
What is an advertisement in Google search ?
Running Chrome on iOS.
If you don’t like Google search you may even try Searx, it’s a privacy-respecting metasearch engine. What it does is similar to Startpage it proxy a search engine and give its results to you without tracking you!
I’ve mine on https://searx.be and it provides Google results by default.
Stop promoting this kind of stuff and keep them to yourself. These are proxies for getting google results. If this kind of stuff become popular google is going to break them. They are not stupid, they don’t bother to break them because they are not a threat to them. So keep this stuff to yourself, people like you ruin good stuff.
Google knows for years that bots or things like Searx are using his services, he even introduced a mechanism against that by requiring a captcha if too many requests are made to his servers.
It’s not because I publicly share my instance to a few users that will harm the Searx project. There are bigger Searx instances than mine like framabee.org that do a lot more advertisement part of the De-google-ify Internet project since 2014: https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/ . I’m pretty sure Google know about that and if they wanted to ban the project they would have done it a long time ago.
I don’t disagree that they know about them.They are not bothered because a few people use them. If they become annoying to them they will block them.
AdGuard for mobile (Android) & https://lite.Qwant.com – with or without ad blocking enabled. But unfortunately the vast majority will not know what’s upon them nor will they care. Sigh. Google, an infinite Ad Company.
“What is your take on the redesign?”
It looks to me like it means a further reduction in the quality of search results, as it seems like this guarantees that whatever it is I’m searching for could no longer appear on the first page (and maybe the second) pages.
But I don’t use Google search, so it’s hard for me to say.
“…you may get several pages worth of advertisement…”
On a tiny phone screen with infinite scrolling several pages is the same as nothing but ads. You search, ads show up so you start scrolling slowly and more ads show up; you flick quickly, ads fly by at warp speed, then you exit out of frustration, spewing obscenities.
And Google wants us to believe their BS about not being an ad company that uses a search engine to serve ads?
Many of my friends don’t really use search on a phone, they use their phones for apps; mostly messaging and social media. Putting lipstick on a pig probably won’t help Google change that.