Google's new look

I noticed doing my first search onGoogle today that they had changed the format and layout of the site. What does that mean? Does it mean that I use the site so extensively that I immediately pick up on subtle changes? Probably, and I didn't even really outwardly notice the changes, there was just some subtle wrongness to the feeling of my search result pages that I couldn't put my finger on. I finally got around to checking the main page and realized that there had been a change there as well (most of my searching is done through my Google Toolbar).

I did click on the "more" button on the main page to see what other services Google might have that I didn't know about. What did I find? Not too much new stuff. I did find that Google has a translation service, so I tried it and found that it works about as well as Atlavista's Babblefish, but the Altavista interface seems a bit more friendly to me.

I remember stories about people that used to count the number of words on the Google homepage and immediately e-mail the company if there was any deviation -- part of the Google main page's allure has been its elegant simplicity when compared with its competition.

The funny thing is that I cannot 100% tell you what the changes to the site are. I've noticed that sponsored links all seem to reside on the right-hand side of the page instead of having 1-3 sponsored links appear at the top of the results page, highlighted in different colors.

Quite frankly, I was hoping that Google would have introduced blog searching and indexing technology with this user interface overhaul . . . it's not as if they don't have the technology. That being said, I still don't mind being the first search result under "strategize".