Good Afternoon,

 

Here is what I see in re-ceating your search.  I do not see the favicons that you see.

 

The green highlight is a feature that Trend Micro offers, showing the site is safe to open.

 

Shannon

 

 

I suggest that you send Feedback directly to the Google Team.  It is easy to do, just scroll to the end of the page, click on the "Send feedback" link and follow the prompts.

 

Shannon

 

You may be experiencing an experiment.

 

 

I do not have green lines, like on your screenshot, maybe it is some extention or customized setting in your particular browser. Anyway, to me that coloring would be a disaster. I want normal google search result: dark blue clickable title, second url and the third text snipper. That's what I love google for.

Hope, feedback I've sent now will have some effect and my account search results will be as always standard.

The green line is a feature offered by Trend Micro Anti-virus.  I can eliminate it at any time.  It highlights safe sites.  If a link is unsafe it will be maroon.

 

Shannon

I have been looking for the solution to this for 5 hours, before running into this post. I found another post in google support, with another person with the same problem. And take a look for the answer 

"Google constantly targets random users with experimental variations to the Search and Image Search interfaces. Sometimes the differences are barely noticeable. Other variations are much more noticeable.

 

You're probably seeing one of these experiments."

This is the google mobile search design, what is implemented this year. Is really ugly for me, is hard to detect the fake websites, ads website and so on. With the old design, is took me no more for 5 seconds for see if in that search results page are what im looking for. With a quick look the the title (blue) and url part (green), and i mean with "quick look" and less than 1 second i know if that web have the information that i need, or have good possibilities for have. Say in another way, with the old design, i can know what websites are fake, ads, or just traps for propaganda. 

Now i cant do that, the mobile design was thinking for lost in the information. Perfect for mobiles, horrible for computers. 

Sorry for my bad english.

So my friend, It seems that we are the ones chosen for an experiment.

Because i can't think in a way for this can be a issue, because my others google accounts work with the same search design in the same computer, and the same browsers.

Google, please don't try that experiment again.

Thank you.

Edit: It's 11th Oct now, I'm still stuck in the layout and it drove me crazy...

Edit: 18 Oct !!!: What's the problem with you Google? I've sent 5 feedbacks since 1 month ago, not even a notice til now?

I've had this problem for two weeks now.  I previously could use Firefox private mode to avoid it, but now even that is ruined w/ this favicond layout.

Let me out of your stupid test, google!

​​https://i.imgur.com/CTGEFsW.jpg

Woohoo! After having the new awful design for a few weeks, it's now reverted to the old design. Phew.

I'm still stuck in faviconed view. Google! Please turn it off!

I used adblocker plus to block the element on the page with their custom filters.

Here is a quick guide I created. Of course if Google renames the favicon class this filter wont' work anymore and you'd have to update it. But so far it's working fine for me.

Remove google.com##.fl if you dont want keep translate this page URL

This new layout is rubbish. 

Apparently some changes have been made 

- completely removed the text ads on the right hand side

- replaced ads from the right them with an additional ad at the top

- favicons at the header of each search entry

I agree with Scott Fleming's support post that it's all very distracting - I personally think it looks like my search page has been hijacked by adware

My brain does not need favicon of website. It makes understanging of search result terribly worse. 

Favicons eat my attention.

I want my attention not on favicons, but on titles of websites and I want to see url of website in green. 

The order my eye reads information is 1) title, 2) url, 3) des.

Not 1) url 2) title 3) des.

I use the ABP (adblock plus) extension in Chrome - it's great for this kind of thing. It has a function to block elements on webpages, including in the Google search results.

I specifically wanted to hide JUST the favicon image & keep the URL. ABP couldn't do this directly so I wrote a little ABP filter that does this. 

Speaking in simple words: Google wants people to click more ads.

Interesting thing for you to know.

In Russia we have a search engine service like Google it is called Yandex.

And Yandex was using favicons for last I guess 7-8 years.

In 2020 Yandex turned favicons off, but they have the same intention as Google. They want to make difference between paid and organic as less as possible.

Russian Yandex just made paid add almost invisible (see screenshot below).

As you see, they do not use any contrast mark like [AD],

They use pretty invisible black on white word [реклама] after green url and that makes AD result almost impossible to differ from organic ones.

I hope that someday google search results will get back to its classic view.
I hope that someday they will turn off favicons and make urls green as it was.

I made a greasemonkey script to get the layout more or less back to what it was.

Google won't let me post it, so here is a png image of it.


After applying:

Create empty folder, for example at C:\Waybacker

Create empty file and name it manifest.json at C:\Waybacker\manifest.json

Using Notepad text editor add the following code inside this text file.

Open Google Chrome Browser and in url editline type chrome://extensions/

Click checkbox "Developer Mode"

Click button "Load unpacked extention..."

Unsing filesystem tree widget choose your folder "Wayback"

Now it is time to test how it works.

Just open empy tab and try to search anything like "how to write google chrome extention".

If you did everything correct, your search results should come without that terrible favicons.

Everything should look like this.

PROFIT!

1. At the second line of code you can customize color of your green.

2. Using "Pack extention..." button, you can create waybacker.crx file and share with someone else or transfer to some other your computers.

3. Theoretically using javascript code it sould be possible to move green url line under the blue title line to achieve the classic google look, but for my knowledge it is not easy right now. To me this look without favicons and green urls is ok workaround to wait when google itself gets back to its classsical view.

Off to find a new search engine :)