they might have changed a little more than his tie colour. Here’s a side by side picture from an interview:

Yep, very little of the main page is links anymore.

The article actually does make an interesting argument that the web is becoming a legacy format in favour of generative AI and social media interaction, and takes this as an example of that trend.

Clickbait headline. What Google did was add a new tab for web results (only) in their search page, similar to images and news.

I do find it interesting/funny that Google felt the need to actually provide this, as a sort of acknowledgement that their main search “results” page is so full of random info boxes and generated content that people can’t find actual links anymore.

According to the page linked in the post above, overseas businesses selling in Australia are subject to the same rules. It does say the rules might be hard to enforce on overseas businesses though.

I would guess that Google uses a randomised rollout system to make changes affect a tiny % of users while they test it (common in big software companies). Changing your useragent might make you appear as a different client that’s not affected (yet). Source: I work in software and can guess.