Another matter worth mentioning about the 'new Google' is the demoted presence of the Open Directory that has now been exiled into the 'more' pages of the Google links (or better replaced by Froogle). The Google links in the SERPs also do not show whether the pages belong to an Open Directory category as they did before.

This is a rather interesting development as the Open Directory project seems to be left behind at this stage. We kind of sensed for some time that Google wasnt very happy with the Open Directory and there seemed to have been major time delays in the updating of the Google directory (compared to the dmoz website).

The Open directory played a rather important role before in getting your website listed high (and listed quickly) in Google but I have the feeling that this is changing rapidly.

its about time. dmoz sucks

the Google directory is now two nodes removed from the home page (vice one) but Google is gaining a ton more link popularity by people placing Google Site Search on their sites and lots of media coverage.

the overall effect of the demotion on link popularity is offset quite a bit by all those other links pointing into Google.

of course they stopped showing the DMOZ categories in their search results, but the link popularity from a DMOZ listing is still boosted a good bit by the Google Directory mirror.