For the past several months, a dedicated team from Google has been working on a secret project, codenamed Caffeine that will define our next generation of web search. The major changes placed most emphasis on search accuracy, indexing and speed. Caffeine is now ready for preview and Google is calling all power searchers and web developers to test out its new infrastructure.
We gave it a try by using “Google” as our search keyword and here are our thoughts:
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1. Search Results
Google’s Old Version
Yahoo
Yahoo search results look static without giving any new temporal relevancy. Its glorious search engine days are definitely over.
Bing
Google’s New Version
“News results for Google” came up first with most recent news about Google (posted 26 minutes ago) displayed. This is what it means by real time search.
About 30 minutes later, the news results for Google (which is not that new now) slipped from 1st to 4th in rank and the search results are now similar to what the old Google version would produce.
Index and Speed Comparison
Google’s Old Version
Google’s New Version
Surprised? It seems that Google’s Caffeine is not effective enough yet.
Takeaways
Search Speed: Based on our test , the old search version can run faster than the new on some occasions. Nevertheless, the new searches (different keywords) were mostly faster. With all that said, even with an overall improvement in speed, it is insignificant and would not be noticeable by most users.
Index Volume: The new Google certainly has far more superior indexing capabilities than the old.
Real-time: The new Google search is certainly going into real time results. From the users’ point of view, this is probably the most pleasing new feature. Did the competition spur Google to initiate this innovation or was this idea already in place before Bing’s launch? We can’t really tell but one thing we know is that real-time search is being quickly adopted across the whole online world.
Algorithm: With real time search integration and Google’s emphasis on indexing, speed and accuracy, it is no doubt that the algorithm has changed. What works now for today’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) could very well be history once Google launches its new search infrastructure.
Since Caffeine has not been completed, our findings about Google’s new search infrastructure are preliminary. But from our experience with it, we are pretty confident to say that most users would welcome Google’s new search.
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