In the last few weeks, Google has once again made numerous changes to how they display their searchresults. After launching Google Instant, they added screenshots for each result as well as a noticeable change to how they display the local search integration. While we can only speculate on the why, I have the feeling that they are not making much headway in improving the quality of the content anymore and are therefore moving on to the presentation thereof.

Screenshots
Looking past Google's impertinence of just using my favicon to integrate the screenshots into the SERPs, I think another aspect of this issue is much more interesting: it seems that most of these screenshots are already completely rendered on Google's servers. In reverse this means that Google runs sites through a HTML-parser ahead of time to have them in stock. Everyone who has done something like this before knows that purely crawling and extracting text from a website and parsing complete HTML-websites are worlds apart when it comes to the computing power that is needed. I find it hard to imagine that Google only takes this step to make their SERPs prettier, I rather think that the screenshots are by-products of their website-evaluations. This means that Google now knows quite well where text and links are positioned on the page, regardless of the their positioning in the HTML-sourcecode and is able to use this information as a ranking-factor. SEO-advice that deals with positioning important links high up in the source-code and then show them at the end of the page with the help of CSS will not die out, but they should keep on losing their effect.

Google Maps Places
The changes for many local searchresults are also quite interesting. Until now, everything was rather simple: there were 10 organic results from the Google-Index and then there were the results from the local Universal-Search. The later were shown in their own Box (the map as well as the results), when Google thought it appropriate. Now this has gotten somewhat more complicated – Google partially rescinded the strict separation between the organic results and the vertical search in displaying the results. This becomes more apparent through this example: here I have a screenshot from the end of September for the search for “delicacies cologne”, which still shows the old results. At the top we have the Unversal-Search integration and then there are the 10 organic results. Something that is also apparent is that a domain like “hoss-delikatessen.de” is shown in both lists. This screenshot shows the results for the same keyword for today, therefore showing us the new way results are displayed: the map moved to the right and will move over the AdWords when you scroll down, additionally, the Universal-Search results have gotten a picture, making them more prominently visible in the SERPs. The real difference though is how the two lists of results are combined. If we look at position #4, we are still shown the domain “hoss-delikatessen.de” - the result is now also upgraded with additional information from the vertical search. This change has rather decreased the amount of results on the first page but the remaining results are more prominently integrated – this should increase the competition for keywords which trigger a local search integration.