There have been several changes this week at Google that I found particularly interesting and wanted to summarize for you.
Of course, yesterday’s May Day confirmation story from Vanessa Fox has details on the ranking algorithm change Google put into place earlier this month. That may be the biggest Google related webmaster story of the month, outside of the Google redesign on May 5th.
Some smaller changes at Google that several SEOs and webmasters picked up include changes to Google Alerts, Google News and the search results page.
(1) Google Alerts is has changed their algorithm to be more sensitive to quality, resulting in less alerts going out but higher quality alerts.
(2) Google News is testing yet another redesign. I posted screen shots to check them out and Google has confirmed these tests.
(3) Google is either testing or there is a bug with specific browsers, where they are no longer showing the estimated number of results for a query and the time the query took to return the results on Google. I have some more details over here and the screen shots are from Think Mantra.
Before:
After:
