It's definitely drastically different, and there are lots of problems.
You can't go directly to images anymore (I ALWAYS used this), it takes you to a landing page. You can't look at the website an image is from without having to hover over it now (this was a VERY useful feature). And, the page feature was preferable to this new scrollable crap.
They didn't make it more minimalistic, they made it a new convoluted pile of crap. They need to stop stealing from the search engines nobody likes and calling it an improvement. People used Google because it was the way it was. If there was a search engine that didn't suck even worse than Google does now, everyone would switch.