While the winning design is nice and quite devoid of visual noise, I did find the mouseovers that display the "Cached" and "Similar" links along with the green URL to be distracting precisely because they would appear during mouseover and catch my eye more than if they were just there to begin with.

Also, there are probably millions or billions of other web pages in greater need of a redesign than Google's results page. This contest feels like trying to come up with a more exotic flavor of vanilla: Tahitian, Indonesian, Madagascar, etc.