Over the years people have accused Bing of copying Google, or at least making changes to Bing that make it appear to be more Google-ish. With a new change to Google.com, it may actually be Google copying Bing.

I was running a search query on Google.com when I noticed the “Web”, “Images”, “Maps”, etc. links that are normally on the left-side of the Google Search results are now appearing above the results:

This is what it looked like before:

I looked for an official Google announcement talking about the change but couldn’t find one, and the change only appears when I am logged into a specific Google account — when logged out or logged into another account, the links go back to the left-side of the page. So I’m not sure if this is a Google-wide change or if my account just happened to be “beta testing” a Google.com change that may or may not make it out to the general public. Seeing as Google likes to roll out changes to a few users to test their effects before making the change on the whole site for everyone, I wouldn’t be surprised if the latter is the case. Just in case, I was wrong, however, I looked in my account settings to see if maybe there is a setting I accidentally tripped to cause this change but didn’t find anything. If you also see the change, be sure to let us know in the comments below.

Interestingly enough, the “Web”, “Images”, “Maps”, etc. links above the search results is very Bing-esque:

Of course links across the top of a page is a standard webdesign technique, and Google has for a long time run links across the top of pages (in the form of the black Google bar). So it wouldn’t be fair to say Google is “copying” Bing. However, it is hard to deny the similarities.