People who complain about the favicon don't understand what their real problem is. It's the extremely distracting breadcrumb above the result's title.

DuckDuckGo and Qwant have favicons in their search results and they don't cause the same UX problems.

You can turn off the favicons under Settings -> Other Settings -> Appearance, the bottom option.

While they do have a favicon they however still show the url.

Can't say I ever noticed the favicons at all, nor do I see any comments complaining about them. I don't think favicons are Google's problem, I see no evidence for this hypothesis.

A more likely problem is the information density of the results pages. Google rarely manages to put more than a single search result above the fold on my screen, while DDG generally gets in six. That, unlike favicons, is a huge disparity between the two.

There is a post with 600+ complaint comments on first page city more than a day now... How can you say "you don't see any comments complaining"?

I don't see any mention of favicons in this thread other than the one I responded to, and I don't know what thread from yesterday you're talking about.

But since both DDG and Google have favicons on the results page, I find it hard to believe this is really a matter that has people moving to DDG. This hypothesis basically amounts to "people are blind idiots who notice favicons on one page but not the other", and I don't think that's true.

> I don't know what thread from yesterday you're talking about.

It's got >2600 upvotes and has been high on the front page for 18 hours now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823

> people are blind idiots

Hm...you may be onto something there :-)

Favicons are mentioned once in the first page of that discussion. I think attributing all that outrage to the favicons, not the fact that they made ads look like results, is a massive mischaracterization of that discussion. Bordering on bad faith...

I maintain that favicons are VERY low on the list of reasons people are switching from Google to DDG. DDG having favicons too should be proof enough of that.

I think you are the only person trying to infer that anyone claimed favicons were the key thing.

The original tweet that started the whole discussion is: "There's something strange about the recent design change to google search results, favicons and extra header text: they all look like ads, which is perhaps the point?"

The comment you replied to said: "everyone is hating on Google's new search results, in part because of a distracting favicon" (emphasis mine).

There is no real inconsistency there, but for some reason you seem to have decided that there is and that it is very important.