Matt Cutts has posted an article titled "Ten recent algorithm changes" on "Google Public Policy Blog".
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/11/ten-recent-algorithm-changes.html

Although the title suggests a list of ten changes to the search or index algorithm, only six seem to relate to that. Two seem to be about snippets. Two seem to be about non-English auto complete.

1. Cross-language information retrieval
2. Better page titles in search results by de-duplicating boilerplate anchors
3. Retiring a signal in Image search
4. Fresher, more recent results
5. Refining official page detection
6. Improvements to date-restricted queries

7. Snippets with more page content and less header/menu content
8. Extending application rich snippets

9. Length-based autocomplete predictions in Russian
10. Prediction fix for IME queries

only #3 is really interresting and new.

Yeah, I expected some real news for webmasters instead this is just a smokescreen. Google wants to show off how open they are while in fact they are not.