This morning all things are change on the Google front. First you’ll notice the Google.co.uk homepage looks a bit smaller than usual:

The homepage is much smaller than before, it does look crisper I do admit.

Once you perform a search you’ll see the following (click to enlarge):

Yesterday Google released their new iPhone browser layout which coincided with the dark grey bar at the top of Google on desktops. For a while now people had noticed URLs being displayed above listing descriptions, this appears to be now live although I’m not 100% if I’m just getting a test from a data center. The left toolbar has now been changed too, everything is now grey/red which is more “serious” looking in my opinion.

This is probably one of my more “whacky” theories of late so please stay with me while I explain. Often as I’m sure most SEO’s out there do is check results for important keywords on a regular basis – EVERYWHERE!

A client might be obsessed with one particular ranking or you might have changed some on-site factor that you’re interested to see the results but if we care, we look.

A few weeks ago I started noticing different results on my iPhone 4 to that of my desktop/laptop – the result were actually quite a lot different, showing sites that usually appeared in positions 7-10 moving up to #2-3. I just assumed that the data used to display Google’s results was being taken from a different location – however later that day the results on my laptop changed to MATCH that of the iPhone 4.

I thought it was a little strange but thought nothing of it, however I saw this happen another 3 times over the course of 2 weeks – coincidence? The image you can see below was taken on my digital camera showing the top 2/3 websites for the keyword “car insurance” – with all personalisation turned off (well at least I tried to switch everything I have access too off) – you can clearly see the results are different (left side iPhone 4 results, right side Laptop results, notice the time 15:42 – click to enlarge):

On the iPhone 4 you can see Elephant and Admiral are #2 and #3 – whereas on the laptop it’s Co-Op and LV at #2 and #3. I then waited and checked the results 2 hours later and as you can see (click to enlarge):

Elephant and Admiral moved up +1 position each, so I waited another hour and eventually the search results in Google match that of the iPhone 4 3 hours earlier (click to enlarge):

Clearly there’s something going on here, potentially the data centers used for mobile devices are updated before those on desktops/laptops or perhaps my iPhone 4 really is magic and therefore very valuable – any offers?