ArisRock

Google has just released a major visual update…

Google is incorporating the “more options” that where previously hidden under “show more options” in the main search window in the main search.

Here’s a few screenshots

Google 6-5-2010

Google wonder wheel

Google video

Google images

They have also introduced “fewer shopping sites” and “more shopping sites” links – just like the old Yahoo shopping slider half a decade ago… I really liked that btw Yahoo!

SEOmoz has done a great job at explaining how Facebook like is likely to change the web and compete with Google. Watch the video below or check SEOmoz page “Whiteboard Friday – Facebook’s Open Graph WON’T Replace Google”

I spent half an hour looking for info on site hierarchies – but evidently there isn’t much to it. You just need to have breadcrumbs in your pages and Google will pick them up.

Google blog says –

The information in these new hierarchies come from analyzing destination web pages. For example, if you visit the ProductWiki Spidersapien page, you’ll see a series of similar links at the top, “Home> Toys & Games> Robots.” These are standard navigational tools used throughout the web called “breadcrumbs,” which webmasters frequently show on their sites to help users navigate. By analyzing site breadcrumbs, we’ve been able to improve the search snippet for a small percentage of search results, and we hope to expand in the future.

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Check out this great article from SEOCHAT.com on how Search Engines Handle the Meta Robots Tag and Robots.txt.

It’s a topic that’s not documented thoroughly and not scientifically enough. I am involved in a another experiment but not as well documented.

If you’re aware of any similar experiments please do let me know!