Google Search is a key tool in most of our daily lives, acting as a digital gateway to information on the web. For some, though, the same gateway appears to be borked and unable to differentiate between links that have been visited and the ones that haven’t.
For reference, Google Search currently highlights all visited links in purple by default, while those yet to be clicked surface in blue. This makes it easy to spot what you’ve already explored at a glance. However, for a number of users, the familiar visual distinction has gone poof.
The bug seems to have arisen roughly a week ago, affecting users across browsers. Complaints about it have made their way to Google’s support forum and the r/Google, r/Firefox, r/Brave, and r/Chrome subreddits, as pointed out by TechIssuesToday, highlighting that clearing cache and browser history doesn’t fix the visual bug. Users report that the problem persists in incognito mode, while others say that the purple links only show up when they’re signed in to their Google account.
This is naturally confusing for users, considering that the visual inconsistency isn’t isolated to a few links, but affects every single link in search results, as seen in the Reddit post below.
This isn’t a widespread issue, but it isn’t an isolated one either
The issue has been observed across Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave, and even Safari on desktop and mobile. Although I haven’t been able to replicate it on my devices, the bug clearly isn’t isolated.
Google knows about the issue, as confirmed by it in reply to a user’s Reddit post. “Thanks for flagging this. We’re aware of the issue you’re seeing. We’re currently investigating it and appreciate your patience while we work on identifying the root cause,” wrote the tech giant three days ago.
It is likely that this is a bug in the backend, and Google will push out a server-side fix for it without any action needed on the users’ end. When that happens, though, is currently unclear. In the meantime, users can try alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing search.
