OK, I'll be "that guy". What exactly has changed? Perhaps I'm merely trying the wrong types of queries or have a spotty memory or am just plain unobservant, but I don't notice any difference. I don't doubt that Google has minor improvements all the time and that that therefore there is, in a matter of speaking, a "new" google search every week or so, but I'm not noticing anything newsworthy. Is this some sort of ironic joke that I've ruined by taking literally?
The search results load via Ajax. That's the main difference that I see. Also notice that the URL changes when you type in your search result, but that the query args are sitting behind a # anchor. Normally, those values don't get sent via referrers, which would mean that you wouldn't get that information in the referer header on the server that hosts the search result when the user clicks it. However, in this case, Google is doing HTTP redirects in order to send that information along. At the very least, we can see that the format for their URLs has changed. But they may just be in a data-gathering mode right now. If they turn off that redirect, you won't be able to deduce the search query that the user typed in based on your webserver logs.
Its a completely new backend they are using so ordering of results is different.<p>From searchengineland:
"Based on the blog post, we can guess that this new infrastructure may include ways of crawling the web more comprehensively, determining reputation and authority (possibly beyond the link graph and what’s typically thought of as PageRank), and returning more relevant results more quickly, although Google’s Matt Cutts told me that the changes are primarily in how we index.Google’s new search is only infrastructure related and includes no UI changes."<p><a href="http://searchengineland.com/caffeine-googles-new-search-index-23823" rel="nofollow">http://searchengineland.com/caffeine-googles-new-search-inde...</a>
Sandbox version: Results 1 - 10 of about 751,000,000 for sex [definition]. (0.11 seconds)<p>Regular version: Results 1 - 10 of about 104,000,000 for sex [definition]. (0.13 seconds)<p>7 times as many results for the same exact query<p>edit: speed wasn't an improvement, but definitely the number of results are.
Still no way to permanently remove a domain from searches? I have a list of about 15 sites I absolutely never want to see in my search results. It seems like a simple feature to have.
It seems like popular websites like Wikipedia and Flickr are ranked slightly higher in the new results compared to the old. Perhaps it's a more crowd-sourced version of pagerank that they have been training/testing. Since they have been HTTP re-directing results for the last 5 months, they could be using this clickflow data to adjust sites ranking according to users behavior on the search result page itself.
One notable observation from morning watching top searches of a client: A lot of websites which "were" high on SERP based on links are now gone.<p>This also connects well because of the recent change google announced in the way link juice is distributed (to avoid misuse of no-follow attribute and paid links) <a href="http://searchenginewatch.com/3633972" rel="nofollow">http://searchenginewatch.com/3633972</a>
Spooky.<p>I have sites at #3 for "Travel Blog" and #2 for "Software Consulting Services" when you search from Google.com. Neither are on the first page in the new version.<p>I know that Google mixes thing up every few months and that my results dance around a bit. But it's a little unnerving to see something so important to so many people's businesses change so dramatically.
Did my comment get eaten , or don't I have the Karma to post? Re-post: Try searching for any term, then click on the 'Try Google Experimental' hyperlink at the bottom of page to see the ??Broken-rewrite-rule-related?? 404
I think google is still trying to squeeze the last 0.1% of gain in terms of web search. Future value will come in terms of social, recommendations, and user interfaces. not squeezing that last 0.1%