Google is all over the map in the way it displays search results,  but it looks like  SEO, web-hosting, and web design are not!

Well, technically they’re still  “on the map”  but the map is not showing up any more in Google searches.

Yes, in case you missed the news,  Google local map results are not being shown any more for web designers, for search marketing firms,  or web hosting.

Before Google’s announcement that the speed at which your site loads for visitors “matters”, we’d all heard it said repeatedly that it did NOT matter for organic rankings, but that it may someday, and it seems that day arrived early last month.

There were a few changes at Google this month which I’ve been pointing out to clients, so I’m posting them here too.

I added the month to my title, because I expect we’ll be seeing a lot more of these types of game changers as time goes on.

Doing a search the other day I was stunned to see a new interface from Google showing me tabbed results, with other relevant search phrases lined up across the top.

I had been using a brand new laptop, so I walked over to my main computer to get a screen shot, and  I wasn’t able to re-create them.  I went back to the laptop, did a search, and *poof*  they were gone.

While browsing through the stats of some (very poorly maintained) sites of our own, I found one that had zero traffic for quite a few weeks. Visiting the site, I saw no site, and just a “Cannot connect to database” error.

A glance at the toolbar showed me a PR zero, and indexed pages in Google (site:domain.com) brought up nothing but a few wp-content pages that should have been blocked by a robots file anyway. Sigh.

I was just mid-session on Google Webmaster tools, when I clicked on a link and saw the message – “that page no longer exists”.  Huh?

I went back to my home page for WMT, and that too was a bad link. Weird. So, i went to my IGoogle home Page, went back into Google Webmaster Tools, and “wham” everything was different!

“Universal Search” was implemented by Google quite a while ago, yet the only visible change to the search results has been occasional interspersing of some video or news.

Search was not really “revolutionized” or “changed as we knew it”, and most users have absorbed the subtle addition without even noticing.

I thought it only fitting that I use my 500th blog post to say goodbye to Microsoft as they begin their slide into obscurity.

As innovative as Microsoft has been, and as influential as they were bringing a computer to nearly every desk in the world, I’ve long thought their days were numbered.

Google Suggest has been around for quite awhile now, but at the moment I’m noticing it take effect on the regular Google homepage.

Basically, you just begin type in something, and Google will pre-fill beneath your text, trying to guess what you’re looking for, showing you related searches, and showing you the number of results it will find.

This week, Microsoft announced the launch of “Live Mesh” which is going to be their answer to the ultimate computer-nirvana goal of accessing everything you have, from anywhere you may be.

Your files, email, pictures, documents, music, and basically your whole life, can be instantly accessible from anywhere you happen to be, as long as you have an internet connection.

Were you up before 6 a.m. today? If so, and if you had gone to Google’s homepage, you would’ve been greeted by an interesting site.

The home page of Google was appearing like a negative photograph image, with everything that us usually in white, appearing in black, and all of the text was in white.

A post this morning on Sphinn really got my fire going… Apparently, there is a document floating around out there that is supposedly a set of guidelines for the search quality team at Google.

Whether it’s legit or not, you can tell that someone put a lot of thought into it, and I think even Matt Cutts himself would have a hard time arguing with anything there.