Arguably, from a design perspective, a wider column of text is harder to read than a narrower column of text. I personally find Google to be more legible than it was before at 53% result space. That's just me, though.
I'm not sure it is just you. Shorter columns are easier to read, which means it serves users even better; our eyes don't have to track a massive row of characters to see what the search result is.
