There are more interesting things going on with Google lately. Here are some of the highlights:
Google is experimenting with mixing adwords results based on previous searches. I saw this yesterday, but GreyWolf beat me to it by a couple days. Interesting thing though. If you search “red shoes” and then search “house plants” you’ll see adwords results from your “red shoes” query mixed in.
If you are signed in to your Google account Google will customize your search results based on previous queries. If you search two related terms Google modifies the second set of results to reflect both search terms. You can see this if you’re signed in to your Google account and search “buy a car” and then “buy an automobile.” This can have some big implications for SEOs if it is applied to the general SERPs. However, for those of us that focus on the long and short tails of search, it shouldn’t be a problem.
Google’s index update continues. The number of results in one of my niches varies by as much as 33%! This happens several times throughout the day. There are some real interesting things being experimented with here. One part of the algorithm that they have been tweaking a lot is the consideration that they give to historical ranking. If a site ranks in a certain spot for a long time, it’s hard to climb from that spot. I’ve noticed this being lifted and turned back on a bunch. I hope it goes back to “lifted” for the sake of one of my sites.
Google’s patent 7346839 was released recently. It’s a pretty old application but it’s neat to read it and see how the different things have been implemented since then. If you know what you’re looking for, there is some really good info in there.
I’ve been playing with ISAPIRewrite lately. It’s a pretty slick little thing. I like that you can quickly create a rule to rewrite non-www to www and have the server deliver a 301 for any non-www request. Good stuff. After a little reading, it’s actually real easy to setup and a good solution for IIS server admins needing to implement mod_rewrite style conditional rewrites. (no, I’m not using it to cloak anything.)
Still using Chrome some. I’m finding some little annoyances with the browser. One annoyance is the fact that it doesn’t support full 256bit encryption on SSL. Bummer. Market share for Chrome is dwindeling after the inital boom.
