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SEO Smackdown's Michael VanDeMar broke the news that Google now appears to be delivering AJAX-based search results.

"AJAX can use more memory than pages generated by flat HTML, especially in Internet Explorer, so some older machines with fewer resources (such as those that might be prevalent in struggling businesses during economy strapped times) will possibly have performance issues," VanDeMar warns.

More importantly, as Econsultancy's Patricio Robles notes, "Analytics providers cannot tell what the search term used was when Google uses AJAX. Needless to say, given how dominant Google is in the search market, this is very problematic. And if implemented across the board, it could threaten the existence of third-party analytics providers whose services will lose a significant amount of value if their clients can't track which search terms are driving their Google traffic..."

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