Google's ability to index new webpages in almost real-time has shown a big flaw in Google's algorithms. Newly created webpages cannot be ranked because it has little or no backlinks available, so what Google does is to artificially inflates the rankings of the recently-created pages based on historical datas and the few backlinks that were detected. In cases where by Google detects increasing search volumes for query that wasn't popular, it assumes that something new is happening around and decides to show more results based on recent webpages. The most recent example would be last morning where Google celebrates 25 years of TCP/IP and the New Year with its logo. Click on the logo and you will be sent to the search results for [January 1 TCP/IP] and in normal cases, searchers would be shown Wikipedia as the top result. Read the full story here
Thats interesting. Does anyone know what the SERPs looked like before Google changed the logo? I am curious to see how different the results are.
Erm...no idea but i did an evaluation on the top 20 SERPs and noticed that all of them are new web page or sites. Maybe we wait for a new happening event such as major earthquake and see what happens.
Well, i guess that it would be a good idea to keep an eye on the Google logo. If it changes to another obscure term in the future, setup a site for it and rake in some traffic for a few days.