(Strike this, see note below)

This problem just started in the last 24 hours - Google rendered fine and was my default search engine for over a month running the 8.1 RTM, and for a few months before that running the 8.1 Preview.

This isn't MSFT's fuck up unless Google is doing feature detection and IE11 is presenting itself as not supporting some trivial HTML5 feature.

Edit: I stand corrected - it looks like something MSFT pushed out as a compatibility list update around the general availability of 8.1 is causing this.