Looks like Google is trying out some new ways of presenting search results, including giving separate results for blog posts, news archive stories and related searches.
When I did a search for "Sheryl Crow", for instance, I saw this at the bottom of the first page of results:
Under "Searches related to: sheryl crow" were suggestions like "sheryl crow lyrics," "sheryl crow lance armstrong" and "john mayer" (apparently the two are touring together).
Below the list of related searches is a section with three blog posts about Crow. If Google sticks with this approach, I wonder what it'll mean for the inclusion of blog entries in the main listing of search results. There were no blog entries in the main search results on this page, though there was one on the next page.
I've found it frustrating in the past to have a lot of blog entries listed in Google's search results, since many blog entries don't have the kind of comprehensive and unbiased information I'm frequently looking for when I search.
I tried another search for "Bruce Springsteen" and got a similar related searches block. Below that, was a listing of news archive results for The Boss, two stories from 2006 and one from 2005.
Whether you'll see any of these changes seems to be a crap shoot. I Googled Sheryl Crow on another PC and got the related searches list, but no separate list of blog entries. One search on "Karl Rove" yielded a block of blog entries at the bottom of the first page, but the next few times I tried the same search I got only the traditional Google results. A search for "wi-fi networking" returned plain vanilla results. One for "Web 2.0" offered related searches and a separate listing of blog posts.
Let us know if you see the changes in your browser and what you think of them.
Below are results of a few trials. If there's a pattern, it's not immediately apparent to me. Perhaps the fact that when a prominent name is entered last name first, these new results at the bottom of the page are missing, but the same name entered first name first often brings up the new results, but not always the same categories. In all cases, though, the result was consistent when I repeated the exact entry. The "--" below indicates no "extra" results:
pelosi: --
pelosi nancy: --
nancy pelosi: Searches related to
brenner paul: --
paul brenner: --
linux os: --
os linux: --
microsoft linux: News archives results
linux microsoft: New archives results
bush: Searches related to
bush george: News results for - and - News archives results
george bush: Searches related to - and - News archives results
george w bush: Searches related to - and - Blog posts about
reid harry: --
harry reid: Searches related to - and - Blog posts about
potter harry: --
harry potter: Searches related to