This isn’t intended. @lilyraynyc Did you have JavaScript disabled on the device? What kind of device was it? The experience you’re showing is what we show for lower end devices that can’t support the richness of the search result page.”
Lily Ray responded:
“JS is not disabled. iPhone iOS 18.1 on an iPhone 15 pro. I was either using the Chrome app or Google app to search, can’t remember which.”
Rajan Patel speculated that it may have been a misconfigured experiment.
Glitches At Google
It turns out to be an example of Google glitching. Something that wasn’t explored is the whether the Internet connection or latency may have played a role in causing Google to react to the SERP request as if it was being made from a low quality device. In any case, it’s an example of how complex serving search results can be.
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