I have the latest version of Opera stable for Windows.
With all the features in Opera why is there no feature to automatically block social media icons , see attached pic .

I realise Opera has an inbuilt version of Adblock Plus but is limited in the choice of blocker definitions. I realise there is an option to add my own list but this is beyond my limitations. The online extension has the option to stop social media icons appearing on websites, and have found this successful in Vivaldi that doesn't have an inbuilt blocker. Can i do as I have suggested in Opera without any adverse effect ?

Yes I mean the company logo and not emoticon.
It seems strange that it happened only once when I did a search in the seperate search bar next to the address bar. However when i typed www.google.co.uk in the actual address bar and did another search the previous behaviour stopped, ie: not in address bar or search box.

I was wondering if it is possible to have a "normal" installation of Opera and a stand alone version on the same "C" drive (Windows 7) ?

Am I going mad? I know I'll soon be moving to Windows 10 and the stress of that is bad enough. Don't you see an "a" symbol to the left of www.amazon jobs, An "ES" to the left of www.standard etc and the "ee logo" to the left of ee.co.uk ? If you are not seeing them my computer must be ******** or I am interpreting the symbols as emoticons, but are something else. ?

Emoticons on the results page have now disapeared .

Updated to the latest version of Opera today and am now getting emoticons showing beside each google search result, is this normal ?

Original poster here.
Many thanks to johnd78 for the workaround. I have not yet tried it on Opera because this machine only has Vivaldi on it, solution works fine. Will the flag need to be changed back to default at some stage ?

I have a problem with balloon tips not working since the recent update to 64.0.3417.54. (Windows 7) When I say balloon tips I mean hovering over items like the start page and reload buttons also all items in the bookmark bar and probably in other places too.
The thing is that I have a similar problen with Vivaldi that I have had for about 4 weeks since an update, they could not reproduce the problem. If I go back to a version of Opera before this current release the balloon tips come back ! In my opinion it can only be chromium related, but why just me ?

Life is too short to be concerned about Opera not updating manually. I often have the same issue. Just download the offline package for the new version and make sure it instals to the same directory as your existing installation. Then your problem will be solved ....until the next time.
I have learned to live with it, sometimes it updates itself, or works with check for updates. Other times I download the offline package mentioned above.