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?
However, this does makes it clear that Google sees http://www.dawdle.com and http://www.dawdle.com/index.php as different pages, so apparently I have some SEO tweaking to do. I'd encourage all startups that rely on SEO to test their best keywords here to get a different feel for how Google "sees" your site.
Second result: 209.161.37.11/dictionary/dawdle
That looks like a bug to me - it's http://www.merriam-webster.com, which, in addition to not being a sketchy IP address, is also a nice brand in terms of dictionaries.
"Just as Facebook announces internal search for public notes, Google counters with an effort to improve on its existing services. In today's blog post, the company unveiled its new Caffeine search infrastructure to web developers."
To me it seems that they improved a bit collapsing same domains. However they still have a lot of work to do - try searching for basically anything and you will still see domains which were on the first page repeated on 3rd or 4th. Annoying.
Another difference is the size of the indexed web:
Sandbox version: Results 1 - 10 of about 25 120 000 000 for www. (0.22 seconds)
Regular version: Results 1 - 10 of about 22 830 000 000 for www. (0.25 seconds)
The auto-suggest seems to be coming up with longer phrases. In the past, I've only seen 3 or 4 word phrases, but the new one appears to recognize longer sentences, too. Of course, this might just be me, trying to find something new when there clearly isn't. In that case, feel free to ignore me :p
Try typing "what's so great about" in the box. Mildly amusing :)
The main difference I can spot is that the regular site returns a web page with a search box with a 200 result code, while this version just returns a 404. So this may in fact may have been a joke that has benn pulled in the interim.
