A teccy friend of mine popped over to have a look. It seems that Microsoft may have taken Google off their compatibility list. To fix this problem (and it was happening on the three machines in my household that I upgraded to 8.1) in IE 11, click on Tools, then Compatibility View Settings...
Have upgraded to 8.1. Now when I navigate to Google in IE11 and enter a search, the results are displayed in single words all down the left hand side of the screen, like so: Anyone got any clues? Cos I haven't!