The design was rolled out to mobile devices almost a year ago.
What you need to know
- Google is making some changes to the way search results are shown on the desktop.
- Starting this week, search results will be displayed alongside icons for the websites they link to.
- The redesign was propagated to mobile devices last year.
Google is redesigning desktop search results to put greater emphasis on website branding. This, the company argues, can both help websites increase their exposure to users and also allow searchers to quickly identify exactly where the information they’ve found is coming from.
With this new design, a website’s branding can be front and center, helping you better understand where the information is coming from and what pages have what you’re looking for.
To that effect, the name and icon of the website can now be found at the very top of the results cards. The color of the text indicating the name of the site was changed from green to black. Webmasters can see the following help page from Google to ensure their website displays its preferred favicon.
The way Google demarcates paid ads in the search results has also gotten a slight makeover. Instead of the green text box from before, ads will now be denoted by an emboldened label at the top of the ad card, as can be seen in the image above.
The design was initially made available on the mobile version of Google Search back in May of 2019, and the change this week simply brings the desktop site up to speed.
In addition to this rather subtle change to Search’s looks, Google is always adding new functionality to its marquee product. For example, earlier this week, it pushed out an update to Google Search that compiles and displays a selection of the most popular products on the web when searching for clothing, complete with pricing, reviews, and comparisons between websites.
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