Google Drops Title & Images From In-Depth Articles

Google has made some significant changes to the In Depth Articles format within the Google search results.

Google has removed the title in the search results segmenting the “In Depth Articles” from the rest of the search results and they have removed photos/images from the snippets of those articles as well.

@SEOlytics posted a nice before and after shot of the In Depth Articles. What you see on the left is the old version and what you see on the right is the new version:

It is unclear if this is a bug or a feature, but I am going to assume it is a feature. Simply because Google has been testing this since last month and now it seems to have gone live.

We have emailed Google for a statement but have yet to hear back about this at the time of publishing.

Postscript: We spoke to Google and they explained they did indeed remove the title as an ongoing efforts to streamline the search results page design overall, since these results are now part of the web results.