I was searching Google on "Perl for ISAPI rather than perl.exe" and noticed at the bottom of the search results was some strange icons (question mark and exclamation mark in a white ballon) and a different set of search results offset from the regular web search results. I hovered my mouse of the results and realized they were links to Google Groups (newsgroups) related to my keyword search. Ok, that's interesting. Does that mean Google is now integrating all Web searches with Google Groups?

This seemed a bit odd since the average user doesn't use newsgroups, but I suppose since it's at the bottom it's not obtrusive. Perhaps Google is promoting newsgroups since they are a good source of technical help/information (as well as porn, Warez, etc.) I tried another search and I couldn't get the Google Group icons & links to appear. So then I went to another PC and tried my original search term and it too displayed the two white ballons with ? and ! in them as well as links to Google Group articles.

I couldn't duplicate this with any other search query, so if anyone can figure out when Google displays newsgroup links please pipe in with a comment.

Here's a partial screenshot (I pasted only from the last search result downward). Note the Web search result followed by Google Groups links.