Just started getting this now. Hopefully it’s some A/B testing that they’ll stop doing, but I’m not holding my breath
Idk if you were around when Google popped up, but it was at a time where the internet was feeling increasingly “loaded” with thousands of info per page. One where the popular engines tried to serve you twenty different things along with your search. Here’s an example:
https://www.definitions-seo.com/images/altavista-3.jpg
Or another:
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/uploaded/timeline/yahoo/yahoo-2003.png
This isn’t a search engine. This is an all you can eat buffet, where the smallest plate is two main courses and three sides. And users just wanted a candy bar.
So you see, a lot of us started to use Google because it was simple. It was decluttered. It was a text input with a ‘submit’ button, and that’s all we wanted. THAT is, and was, google’s core functionality, and I think it’d do them well to remember that.
Now, if you wanna argue that’s changed, I can agree to that. But I don’t want morning news when I search for porn, that’s just gonna kill my boner. And I don’t want ads about coffee makers when I’ve just bought a coffee maker, that just means you’re incompetent. I want a search engine that searches things and provides results. That’s it. And just like Google caught momentum because they delivered this minimalistic facade that the users wanted, this is also how Google will die - at the hands of the next lightweight engine without corporate bullshit. Because the users will gobble it up.
