I thought Google's 'empty search result' graphics about the possible EU copyright directive were mockups but apparently not (at least for me)???
Looking at the code, the tiles at the top of the page have no text and are loading a blank 1×1 pixel image.
Results further down the page have the same amount of empty whitespace for all of the titles.
The same result occurs if disabling JavaScript, which falls back to a much older version of the results page, indicating this is a change on Google's server side and not an issue loading things.
But yeah... anyone else got or heard about Google actively redacting links to news sources from results (even though the legislation that would require it isn't in force AFAIK)?
This is all in Safari, by the way.
More screenshots showing this not happening to non-European news sources, and how it still occurs in the old non-JS Google results layout.
And reproduced in Firefox too. (Note: This didn't originally happen in Chrome or Firefox, I've instead found what information Google is reading to send back redacted results.)
And now we've managed to reproduce it on someone else's computer; so this is definitely not some glitch with me, this is actually something Google is doing.
Notes:
* This only happens to results from news websites.
* Specifically news websites inside of Europe. (Al Jazeera, India Today, US sites, etc. all show up).
* This happens even if the search term is not news related.