tedster - 1:46 am on Mar 24, 2012 (gmt 0)

And the search team probably don't have a lot to do with what appears on the page or it's overall kayout ie Google assets / ads etc. Who controls this?

There is a dedicated team, but I don't know that I ever heard a name for them. The "layout team" or something like that, I guess. If you make a project of regular screen shots and measure the pixel by pixel changes, you'll see small (VERY small at times) tweaks and tests going on all the time. Also the same goes for the color values, even what shade of black is being used for test, blue for links and green for URLs.