Wow - I noticed the "Easter Egg" for the New Year's logo over at Google, but before I read this post, I didn't really look at the results. It looks like Google's latest set of tweaks to their search ranking mechanism have made it easier to game - as unofficial Google blog puts it:

Google paid a big price when it started to index pages faster and show them in the search results minutes after they're published. The problem is that you can't rank a page that has just been created because it has no backlinks so Google artificially inflates the rankings of the recently-created pages based on historical data and the few backlinks that are detected.

As I post this (head over to the linked post for the image), Google's top search result is a splog set up specifically for this Easter Egg. I think there might be a late night for a few folks at the Googleplex over this :)

Technorati Tags: splog, spam