Whenever Google makes a change, no matter how small, it’s a big deal. Ok, maybe a bit more to us, the people who work with it nearly all day, but still… when they change a portion of their algorithm, which happens frequently, it can have huge ripple effects.

Arguably their largest update in a while, codenamed Caffeine, has been in the works for quite a long time.  Matt Cutts (the unofficial face of Google, at least in my eyes) recently mentioned Google would be slowly rolling out the Caffeine update during the coming weeks.

Today we noticed something interesting when we accessed Google.com in IE. Aside from the subtle graphic changes, it seemed…. different.

We figured it could just be small usability changes.  That was, until we brought up a search results page.

Location based search has been a huge focus for Google, as well as social networking behemoth, Facebook. Could this be a huge step in that direction? Is this indeed an indication that Caffeine is around the corner? We’ll have to wait and see.

Note : This was tested in Internet Explorer 8.