After 25 years, Google's iconic Search button is disappearing — at least for some users
Internet After 25 years, Google's iconic Search button is disappearing — at least for some users News By Amanda Caswell Published 11 August 2026 Google is testing the biggest change to its homepage in years When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. I've been writing about AI replacing the internet as we know it for the past several months.Latest Videos FromTom's GuideWatch full video here: For more than 25 years, Google’s homepage has barely changed. You type something into the search box, hit Google Search, and get a page of results.
- ▪Internet After 25 years, Google's iconic Search button is disappearing — at least for some users News By Amanda Caswell Published 11 August 2026 Google is testing the biggest change to its homepage in years When you purchase through links o
- ▪I've been writing about AI replacing the internet as we know it for the past several months.Latest Videos FromTom's GuideWatch full video here: For more than 25 years, Google’s homepage has barely changed.
- ▪You type something into the search box, hit Google Search, and get a page of results.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 26 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ Google's classic Search button is gone in a new AI-first homepage — Search Engine Watch - SEO, AI Search, PPC News & Analysis
Tom's Guide files mainly under tech. We currently carry 1,414 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Tom's Guide |
| Canonical URL | https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/after-25-years-googles-iconic-search-button-is-disappearing-at-least-for-some-users |
| Publication time | Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:13:26 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-11T19:15:45.250Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-11T19:15:45.250Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | UvHwjNM3KFla · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Internet After 25 years, Google's iconic Search button is disappearing — at least for some users News By Amanda Caswell Published 11 August 2026 Google is testing the biggest change to its homepage in years When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. (Image credit: Getty Images) Copy link Facebook X Reddit Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter If you tried to Google something recently and felt as if things looked a little different, it's not just your imagination.Some users are seeing a redesigned Google homepage that removes the familiar Google Search button and replaces it with shortcuts for AI Mode, Create images, Ask about files…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Tom's Guide.
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