Introducing Google Caffine

The Google Webmaster blog recently announced a ‘secret project’, since dubbed ‘Google Caffeine’, that the company has been working on over previous months. It is supposedly the next-generation architecture for Google’s web search engine and, in an unusual move, they have opened up the test site to users, requesting feedback on the performance of the new technology.

The new Google Caffeine search engine can be viewed and tested here . There are no obvious differences to the look of the search interface because Google has been working on changes ‘under the hood’, targeting improvements in the size of the search database, the indexing speed, accuracy and comprehensiveness of the search experience.

Although Google makes almost constant changes to its search algorithms and infrastructure, it hasn’t made an update of this magnitude since 2006 and cynics note how this announcement of the new Caffeine search indexing tool has come so soon after Microsoft launched their new Bing search engine and combined with Yahoo!. However, Google say they have been working on these latest developments for many months and not surprisingly, such an announcement has generated much press interest and comment, as well as some initial good reviews about the performance of the new tool.

The impact of the new indexing infrastructure does seem to have increased the speed at which the results are generated for some searches, although of course the test site isn’t yet under the usage pressures of the main site, plus there doesn’t appear to be so much integration of the ‘universal’ results at this stage, such as videos, images and news stories. Tests of the results being generated are showing notable differences in some areas and very little ranking changes in others, depending on the type of searches made.

Of course the test site is still undergoing development and feedback, so Google will do a lot of fine tuning before making Caffeine mainstream, but there’s a suspicion that social media will be playing a bigger role in Google’s results. Those in the search engine optimisation industry are keeping a close eye on how this will affect ranking positions but the basic principles of SEO are still likely to apply in a significant way.

Once the developments from Google Caffeine are finalised and rolled out to the main search market, Google is hoping that the relevancy of results will be improved for the user and so maintain their dominant position in the search market, whatever attention and search enhancements Bing achieves. There may well be implications for the ranking visibility of some companies who depend on their Google rankings for their site visits, but this is an accepted risk of achieving natural rankings on search engines.

We will continue to review and assess what wider impact these changes at Google may have on the search and online business market, but if you would like any further information in the short term, please contact us now.

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