Google’s search engine developers have been secretly developing a new project – dubbed “Google Caffeine”. Caffeine apparently has a next generation architecture for Google's web search which aims to push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. Sounds like a huge step for Google but is it all hype?
Well to start with, and for the first time ever, Google isn’t just updating its current search engine index. Caffeine is an actual fundamental re-engineering of how Google’s entire indexing system works. This isn’t a revamp; it is in fact more along the lines of a total indexing rewrite.
Google's Matt Cutts has said “It gives us a lot more flexibility, a lot more power. The ability to index more documents. Indexing speed - that is, how quickly you can put a document through our indexing system and make it searchable - is much much better." However, Cutts does go on to warn not to expect any obvious changes – it claims most of the updates are "under the hood” and the changes in Google Caffeine are “primarily in how we index”.
The other good sign is Google is being very transparent about this new leap forward, so much so that they have actually invited the world to play in their Google Caffeine sandbox . This link to their beta version of Google Caffeine has been set up to gain valuable feedback to their new search engine. Google are currently requesting feedback for their engineers on the differences between Google's current search results and their new system.
So this does show one thing in my mind; the search engine giant isn’t as fearless as I first thought. The ever increasing competition has finally forced Google to act and fortify its own position in the search engine industry. The growing series of threats that have emerged recently seems to have made Google a little more uncomfortable then we suspected. The main threat at the moment seems to be from Microsoft who have recently rebranded their search engine to Bing and who landed a deal to take control of Yahoo's search business. Other new contenders include a knowledge engine by Wolfram Alpha and the real time search facilities from Facebook and Twitter.
I have had a play with Google Caffeine and I have found that the new search engine is not only faster, but is also capable of producing real-time results. Some of my search queries came up with slightly different results then the current search engine, but nothing major to report.
Google Caffeine seems to give better search positions for websites with good structures and fast loading times. However I do think this has always been the case with Google, they have never liked badly structured websites or slow loading ones so this isn’t really a big difference between the two search engines.
I’m going to do some more research into Google Caffeine and try some further tests especially in terms of search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts. In my current research I have read that Google Caffeine will give more emphasis to “authority” websites – however I have no idea what they mean by this as the term is slightly ambiguous. What is an authority website? Are we talking Wikipedia, Government websites, or large brand websites?
Opening up Google Caffeine to the internet community for testing is a wonderful idea and it gives us all a glimpse of things to come. Google Caffeine will eventually replace the Google main search engine after these tests have been completed. However they will have to do a lot of fine tuning before making Caffeine its default search engine.
With Google’s new search engine stepping into real-time, with more of an emphasis on real-time search results, I believe that social media will play a big role in Google’s new search engine results. However it will be interesting to see if Google places too much focus on websites like Twitter?
If you have any kind of online presence, I suggest you to try out the search queries that are relevant to your website and see if this new search engine will affect your results in any way. So go get yourself an intake of Caffeine.
