Comment by thegeekpirate

This happened to me after I had formatted (new PC), and since I had just started using Firefox as my main browser and did not see this change on Chrome, I believed that Firefox had been gimped by Google in this specific manner.

Needless to say, this was the straw that made me switch to DuckDuckGo instantly, and I've been happy with it, especially with the ability to use the Google bang (!g) in the infrequent case it's required.

This has taught me a valuable thing about A/B testing though—don't make an experiment any longer than it needs to be, and a refresh should bring them back to the old behaviour, just in case it's bad enough to make them switch completely.