Google’s appearance can change for a few common reasons, often tied to updates, experiments, or personal settings. Here are the main factors:

• Product-wide design updates
  • Google periodically refreshes the look of its interfaces (logos, fonts, spacing, colors) to match evolving branding and to improve usability across devices. These updates can be rolled out gradually or tested on subsets of users before a broader release. This is usually subtle and aims to preserve recognizable identity while modernizing the UI.

• A/B testing and experiments
  • Google often runs experiments (A/B tests) that show different layouts, features, or elements to different users. If you’re seeing a layout that looks different from what you usually see, you might be in one of these test groups. These tests can affect search results page layout, widgets, or result presentation temporarily.

• Personalization and context
  • Your Google experience can vary based on whether you’re signed in, your location, language, device, and browsing history. Personalized settings can change how results are organized and how the page looks, including the presence or absence of certain UI elements. Incognito or signed-out views can also differ.

• Feature flags and experimentation across products
  • Google’s product suite (Search, Maps, News, Images) often deploys new UI features to specific products or markets, which can alter the look of related pages or components even if the core search function remains the same.

• Accessibility and device considerations
  • Design changes may be implemented to improve readability, contrast, or touch targets on mobile devices or various screen sizes, leading to differences between desktop and mobile views or across devices.

What you can try to sanity-check or influence what you see:

• Refresh or try a different device or browser to rule out a localized change or cache issue.
• Sign in or out to compare personalized vs. non-personalized views.
• Clear browser cache or disable extensions that might modify page rendering.
• Check for official Google posts or help pages about recent look-and-feel changes or experiments.

If you want, I can look up the latest official notes or discussions about recent Google design updates and summarize what changed and why, with sources.