You can’t improve on perfection they say, but it seems Google keeps trying anyway. Despite being the go-to search engine for the majority of the world, Google still tries to make changes to the popular search engine to find ways of making it even better.
If you tinker with perfection though there is always a chance you could ruin it too and it appears the latest changes to Google search, while seemingly minor, may just be doing that. While the new changes alter little regarding the already helpful and fast search results, it is designed to make navigating those results a lot easier by being able to identify brands or authentic sites easier by displaying the icons in the search results too.
It sounds like a noble idea at first, but it appears to be having the wrong effect when it comes to ads as well, as instead of sponsored ads being slightly visible, they’re now also identified in the icon space leaving people complaining that the search engine is now blurring the lines between ads and authentic search results and potentially trying to push up their ad click rate.
It might be a matter of people just needing to adjust to a change as they have not yet gotten into the habit of looking at the icons effectively, but it could also just as easily be a ploy to make ads harder to differentiate. You could also argue though that if an ad leads to the right result is it really such a bad thing? Are you someone who deliberately goes out of their way to look past the ads on Google or does I not bother you whether a search result is sponsored or not?
Last Updated: January 24, 2020
Seeker
January 24, 2020 at 19:52
I have replaced google with duckduckgo as my default search engine in order to reduce the amount of info corporations steal from me.
Son of Banana Jim
January 27, 2020 at 09:36
And while you’re at it, replace chrome with brave – the latter has a built-in ad blocker.
The less data google gets from us the better.