Now you see it, now you don’t. Google, it seems, launched a new look on Monday – at least in Australia. But, before I could take a closer look, it disappeared into thin air. Perhaps Google is doing some testing…

What I do remember from my brief glimpse was:

• You can localise even further the search results you receive by entering your city or town name in a box
• Searching by country is now a lot harder to spot but it is now on the left of the screen together with images and many other interesting options
• Most notably however, the Google Adwords advertisements are now moved much closer to the organic search results, meaning they are much harder to notice that they are advertisements. In fact, they now look much more like organic search results

My concern for the website owner is really the box that says enter your city. If this is selected my fear is that a Google search will lock out all other results. I will report more on this when the ‘mew look’ appears again. What does this mean for local SEO? I am quite sure it will become even more imprtant now.

If anyone has any ideas I am sure our readers would love to hear them.