Google Tests Desktop Results Without Favicons; The Old Design

Jan 24, 2020 - 7:19 am 12 by
Filed Under Google

Google Black

Some folks are seeing Google test the old Google desktop search interface. Remember the one before Google launched those (what I feel are horrible) favicons and black ad labels for the snippets? Yea, Google is testing showing the old interface to some searchers.

I saw at least two tweets mentioning this to me, here they are:

So this is not a bug, I don't think. Just like when Google pushed out on mobile last year, some saw the green ad label and old interface stick around. Danny Sullivan from Google told us back then "I checked. It's not a test. With these types of changes, we sometimes don't roll out to a tiny percentage for some last metrics gathering. That's what's happening here; I expect it'll be complete in the coming weeks."

So I assume this is similar to that launch and this is not a bug, but still out there for testing data. Just to make sure that CTR rate on those ads are super high. :)

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update: I was wrong, kind of, Google is going to take feedback and make changes, and test them:

 

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