Thanks everyone that's interesting.
The main thing that makes me think there has been an update besides the shuffle in results is the niche I'm looking at has a first page of results littered with keyword rich domains, but they're all like blog type pages on blogspot, webs, weebly, tumblr, wordpress, etc.
So it's keywordphrasehere.tumblr.com etc.
And they're generally rubbish, and many of them are aimed at the US - US products priced in Dollars.