I heard about it being reverted, but I have seen far too many people, myself included, click the links at the top thinking they're the first result when they're not. This article on ads offering gov services has some great examples in it.

Remember when Google highlighted ads in different colours? Like the garish pink and green from way back in 2001: https://edge45.co.uk/blog/google-adwords-evolution-timeline/ (scroll down to see it near the bottom)

Look at how they intentionally tried to differentiate the ad from the rest of the search results: large swaths of white space separate the top sponsored ads from the rest of the search results even in a time when monitors were smaller, with clearly different link and background colours, etc.

I wonder if anybody's built a browser plugin to provide Google search results pages that look like they used to back in 2001? ;-)

From that article:

> It’s hard to imagine what Google looked like without ads

...I'm not too sure on that one, Colin. Not a whole lot of imagination required.

What exactly was reverted? Google search results look like the screenshot in that article for me.

I believe it was the placement of the favicon in regular search results that was reverted because it appeared in the same place as the word "Ad" in the ad.

Hah, my tired brain didn't even clock that consistently wasn't there for the actual results. Which I guess also says something about it being a clear distinction...

(DDG seems to do it the other way around: results have favicons, ads have nothing in that spot. anyways, adblocker back on)