Well, both of you might be right, Google is always running a crazy amount of experiments (mostly on how sloppy they can be and still get away with it it seems ;

Well, both of you might be right, Google is always running a crazy amount of experiments (mostly on how sloppy they can be and still get away with it it seems ;-) Here's a trick though: if you notice anything getting significantly worse, just try to report it. Reporting is a seriously annoying process as they have applied a number of tricks to discourage feedback and I don't know if they ever read those reports, but it has one nice side effect: When you report anything you get removed from the current experiment that you are assigned too (e.g. "break site:" or "slide in ads on top of search results just as user is about to click first result"[1]) and assigns you to a new one that is hopefully less annoying. [1]: a colleague of mine demonstrated this to me three years ago, unfortunately he followed my advice and also disabled at least one extension before I could take steps to verify that it was in deed a Google experiment.