This upcoming change in algorithm and the interestingly named
server "Big Daddy" were publicly posted on Matt Cutts blog
for beta testing by SEO's (and other Google Watchers) who
read him regularly. (For those who don't know, Cutts is a
software engineer at Google & shares SEO tips on his blog)

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

Of course this news was a bit much for the client to digest
in one chunk and he had little time to read the articles I
referenced in my note above, but it was enough to assure him
that I knew what I was talking about and explain the
differences in my report and his own keyword searches at his
end of the country. It's a bit odd to try to explain to a client
"there are different Googles." Few know or understand this.

Another issue cropped up later in the day when I was doing further research for a different client and found, while we were speaking on the phone, that his results differed from my own on specific query operator searches. We were using the "site:businessdomain.com" query operator and the "allinurl:pick-your-own-URL" query operator to limit search results and got vastly different numbers of results and rankings for the same searches.

The first stunning thing in this example was that we are less than 25 miles apart in Southern California. The second shocker was that I tried simply hitting the "Search" button a second time after getting the first results page and things changed again! All of this happening in a single day makes me believe that some percolating of results is going on as Google eases into an algorithm change.

Perhaps this is not all that unusual, but in seven years of this work, I've not seen the volatility noted in January of 2006. Are we about to have a major SearchQuake? Is Google about to split the earth and spew volcanic new results? Stand by for the BigDaddy SearchQuake sometime this month or next.