It's nice to see some updates finally rolling out for a search engine now, except this time it isn't an algorithm update. Google has decided to turn to a new way to display their search engine and search results. Google plans to blend in results from news, videos, images and local results. Furthermore, Google decided to approach a cleaner look by cleaning up the links displayed above their search box and simply placing a sitewide navigation bar with all the required links.

Now this new update that Google has rolled out is meant to integrate their various search engines to provide more targeted results to your search term. Most of these items would be displayed in the Google Onebox (displayed above the SERPs).

For example, searching for Chemistry Books on Google would have a onebox result of some of the chemistry books that Google has indexed into their Book Search Engine. Another example would be, when you search for Obama , which would display a couple of new stories indexed by Google News. Finally, searching for a Dominos in Illinois would actually have a result of the top 3 results from Google Maps. Another small addition is that Google will display stock information from Google Finance next to a company's result, like Dominos!

These new additions to Google's Search Algorithm shows that Google is setting a new standard for search engines everywhere (mainly Yahoo! and MSN at the moment). They are focused on offering more information for the user to help them gain access to information that they might be looking for, but not forcing them to do so. Check out Search Engine Land 's take on Google Universal Search 2.0 as well.

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Carolyn Shelby posted an interesting article at her blog about a website that is using one of the oldest an obvious spamdexing techniques there is at

http://www.cshel.com/seosem/2007/05/how-well-does-the-google-algo-catch-spamdexers/

I was actually a little surprised. I know many of us build a few sites to send some linking juice to our sites, however parking 5000 or more domains on a parking page template meant to send links to the main site is a tad overboard, especially when they are all identical replicated website. That should trip a few filters here and there, or so some engines would have us think… But it sure works and I do notsee any of the engines doing anything about it since her article was posted. I expect more than a few black hats are already on this bandwagon.

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Just thought this was an interesting topic being addressed by other SEO's in the field. Many would wonder if complying with W3C Standards would affect your rankings in Search Engines. Personally, I really haven't noticed a difference between websites W3C Compliance rank different than other websites with messy code.

However, having a messy code could lead to a couple problems. First of all, if a search engine can't index your website correctly due to incorrect coding, this would definitely cause a problem with your SEO Ranking.

Another fact, is that different browsers like Internet Explorer and Mozilla FireFox read code differently. Internet Explorer tends to read code a bit loosely than FireFox does. This would affect your visitors that use a browser displaying your website incorrectly.

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