Google Adsense testing new link title formats?

Interesting - just visited one of my news sites in development, and noticed something different with Adsense.

Normally, the keyword titles are simply bold text.

However, I’m now seeing both italicised bolded and italicised unbolded keyword titles - here’s two screenshots, side by side, of the same page after refreshing - notice the normal ad highlighted at top, vs the italicised formats in the lower ads:

The site I’m seeing this on is Camera Core, a news site I’m developing covering camera phone technology and products. Adsense is being used at present simply for basic traffic tracking.

The page in question is just the homepage - refreshing brings up slightly different formating - bold italics vs unbold italics.

My first thought was that a HTML tag must have been accidentally left open - but Adsense is javascripted in and so shouldn’t be affected by this. That means it’s changed by Google.

What’s interesting as well is that this was a page where three ad units were displayed, and it was always the middle ad unit that showed the keyword titles in italics. Does this mean that Google are attempting to break user-blindness developed by the first visible Adsense ad?

No idea how widespread this change in title format is at present - but it does shows Google continuing to experiment with Adsense formats.