This last week Google published a list of their ten most recent search algorithm changes.    In Summary they are.>

• Cross-language information retrieval updates: For queries in languages where only limited web content is available, Google will now translate relevant English web pages and display the translated titles directly below the English titles in the search results.
• Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content: Google is now more likely to pick text from the actual page content for the snippets they provide in search.
• Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors: They are putting less emphasis on duplicated anchor text. The result is more relevant titles that are specific to the page’s content.
• Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian: This is already our practice in English.
• Extending application rich snippets: This enables people who are searching for software applications to see details, like cost and user reviews, within their search results.
• Retiring a signal in Image search: Google retired using data related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.
• Fresher, more recent results: Fresher Content, ranks higher.  This change impacts roughly 35 percent of total searches.
• Refining official page detection: This will tend to rank official websites even higher in our ranking.
• Improvements to date-restricted queries: This helps ensure that users get the results that are most relevant for the date range that they specify.
• Prediction fix for IME queries: Autocomplete was previously storing the intermediate keystrokes needed to type each character, which would sometimes result in gibberish predictions for Hebrew, Russian and Arabic.

For a longer discussion go to Google’s blog entry Ten recent algorithm changes