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Just after Christmas I mentioned the jigsaw puzzle that I'd given Steve for Christmas and suggested that it was a great way of developing skills to solve problems. Steve got that one finished by the first week in January and now he's started on another one that I bought him yesterday.

Quite frankly those jigsaw puzzles are not hard ... after all you do have an image on the box to work from and you have all the pieces there in front of you. But right now Steve and I are working on another puzzle where we can't see the picture and we certainly don't have all the pieces just yet.

To make it even more fascinating there are a lot of people working on this puzzle and some of them have pieces that we don't have while we have pieces that they don't have. You might think that it's a situation that cries out for some co-operation but the prize for working out this puzzle is to have a massive lead on everyone else so no one is going to be sharing anything.

What's more, it's a puzzle that you all should be participating in too because, if we're right, there's a major change in the way Google ranks sites not very far off. If it does come and it catches you unawares then you are going to have to a lot of catching up.

And don't think that you can read what I say here and instantly have a grasp of what's going on. I'm not going to tell you everything that we know and, even if I did, it could be possible that what I tell you is completely wrong. Instead I'll give you some hints that may or may not be important and the rest is up to you to find.

The pieces of the puzzle
So what are the pieces of the puzzle that we have so far? The first piece of the puzzle that we have already is the health of Google's algorithm. We all know that when the Google twins set out to conquer the world they had their algorithm based on links.

Basically their algorithm looked at a number of factors but one in particular was the links to a particular site and the importance of a site was gauged by the incoming links to that site. It was a great way to assess the importance of various websites and it did work well ... until people started to game the system.

People bought links, people traded links, people even set up sites to feed links to other sites and suddenly links were not doing what they were supposed to do from Google's point of view. Of course over the years the algorithm was tweaked, fiddled with, adjusted and updated until now it must look nothing like the original one did. I somehow get the feeling that it's now so rickety that maybe it's now held together with the Google equivalent of chewing gum and fencing wire.

But we still hear the Google mouthpieces preaching that the righteous way to get good search engine positions is to look for links from trusted sites. Man, he has said it so often that I bet Matt Cutts even repeats that one in his sleep but few people really believe it any more.

These days there are so many sites out there that you might have just produced the world's premier authority site on the most important subject imaginable and Google may never find it because identifying one of Google's 'trusted' sites is almost impossible and getting links from it and many others to satisfy Google is just as hard.

So the idea that quality sites will rise to the top of the sites because of incoming links from trusted sites is a croc of you-know-what and Google knows it but they would rather you didn't wake up to that fact just yet.

The next piece of the puzzle is the way Google seems to use your previous searches to provide you with information on any subject you're searching on now. It could do that through your Google account and, even though you may not realize it, you have one if you have a Gmail account. Not only do you have one but if you stay logged into your Gmail account then you're logged into your Google account ... and Google is watching.

Another piece of the puzzle we picked up today and that involves a patent application that Google lodged on February 22. Interestingly one of the inventors listed in the application is none other that our beloved Google mouthpiece - Matt Cutts.

Have a look through the website of the US Patent and Trademark Office and you should be able to find it. You don't even have to read further than the Abstract to begin to see that it's interesting and could go a long way to changing the way Google sees the Web.

And the final piece of the puzzle has to do with Local Search. Steve and I have been spending a lot of time reading about that lately and we think it's something that Google sees as very important. The technology that we're using now to access local search is not the technology that we will be using in perhaps five years.

When that time comes Google knows that it is going to have to return genuine search results that are as free of rubbish as they can make otherwise people just won't use it.

We think that the changes that are coming to the way Google identifies quality sites are one of the ways that Google will clean out the rubbish and only return quality sites for the searches people make. So if you want your sites to appear then now is the time to find out what Google is up to.

To do that all you need to do is to start experimenting with some of your own work. You also need to start visiting sites that deliver genuinely solid search engine information. Sadly you won't find that on most of the search engine boards that are around today but there are public places where some solid discussion is going on. Find those and you'll start picking up pieces of the puzzle yourself.

Somehow we both see this puzzle as a whole lot more fun because we don't have a clear picture and we don't have all the pieces. We hope you will see it that way too and stick at it and when you find the answer we hope that you will keep it to yourself.