Some users reported on the Chrome help forum and social sites that half of Google search results on the screen are covered by a gray window for certain queries, while the root cause of the issue is still unknown and this could well be tied to Google search as few reported they’re noticing this on other browsers too. The chromium team is investigating the issue and you can expect to know why that’s happening and a possible fix soon.
The issue happened for affected users when they searched for a particular query like ” high school musical”. Google employee himself notes in the bug report that the issue happens when searched for “fordvferari” or “Ford vs Ferrari”.
While we couldn’t reproduce the problem for those search terms. The user signed into Google account should also be taken into consideration where few users said turning on/off ” Web and App activity” fixed the problem for them, while this workaround is not working for others, the reports [1] [2] [3] may help Google to figure out the cause.
“Sometimes after I search, the page will have a large blank grey window covering about half of the page results. It has little arrow buttons like as if the previewer portion is bugged out. this happens only on some searches.” A user asks for help.
The bug report has been created a week back, the issue has been escalated to the Google search team also. Are you affected?