GOogle, Why is my search messed up?

January 16, 2020 9:38 AM

Hi ALl, REcently, as in the past few days, when I search for something on GOogle, I am greeted with something disconcerting. I use a screen reader, and always used heading navigation to move from result to result. Before, when I would do this I would be presented with page titles. NOw, I get URLs followed by page titles, like this: "https://wikipedia.org, Wikipedia." Needless to say, this is annoying to wade through especially when the URL doesn't mean anything in itself.

I've switched browsers on my Mac to no avail, tried a private browsing window, and looked for any obviously-changed settings on my end. NO dice. I tried a Windows computer but can't reproduce the behavior. This is driving me nuts.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks, AskMe.

posted by Alensin to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

It's probably to do with the recent redesign, displaying site icons and website URLs prominently.

Here is a tweet from January 13th:

Last year, our search results on mobile gained a new look. That’s now rolling out to desktop results this week, presenting site domain names and brand icons prominently, along with a bolded “Ad” label for ads. Here’s a mockup:

And then there's a picture showing how search looks on the desktop now, with the icon and URL showing up before the name of the page.
posted by ODiV at 9:51 AM on January 16, 2020 [3 favorites]

Google released a redesign of their search results this week for desktop browsers. It's apparently inheriting from their mobile design. I haven't found much detailed information about it from Google's official channels, but here's a third-party item.
posted by ardgedee at 9:53 AM on January 16, 2020

Not sure what browser you're using, or what your ad-blocking options might be, but this just-posted Ask suggests one possible solution with a uBlock Origin rule.
posted by asperity at 2:00 PM on January 16, 2020

Also came in to link you to essexjan's response in that other Ask-Me thread.

But if you don't absolutely have to use Google, like for professional reasons, have you tried using DuckDuckGo as your default search engine? Not only is it more privacy-friendly, its appearance settings allow you to toggle on/off site icons and URLs in the result excerpts.
posted by mumkin at 5:10 PM on January 16, 2020 [1 favorite]