Google has yet another surprise for webmasters and SEO professionals, a new search engine – Caffeine . This time, however, Google is offering users a chance to test drive it on a separate server asking for feedback instead of applying it without our knowledge while experimenting if changes would be noticeable.
Unlike what Microsoft did when it introduced a change recently this year through Bing, Caffeine maintains Google’s existing visual architecture and keeping the changes in crawling, indexing, and ranking “under the hood”. For now, the main thing between Caffeine and the still existing infrastructure is how their search results will be different. However, Google claims that “most users won’t notice a difference in search results” so they’ve made available the preview for power searchers and web developers who can detect changes in the Caffeine search results with instructions on how to send them feedback.
I went to preview Caffeine and made a query on the term “SEO”.
And performed the same query with the current Google search infrastructure.
As you may observe from the two screenshots above, Caffeine’s search results returned 249,000,000 pages at .22 seconds while the current system returned only 198,000,000 at .19 seconds for the search term “SEO”. I repeated the procedure and Caffeine continued to display more pages with its results and was only equal or a few hundredths of a second slower than Google’s current infrastructure.
Also, in the Caffeine search results, there are already two entries from Wikipedia involving “SEO” and “Search Engine Optimization” terms while results returned by the current system was a single Wikipedia page only for “Search Engine Optimization”. This could mean an improvement or feature that Google wants to implement with Caffeine for saving every surfer the time from keeping the habit of having to perform two or more separate queries of synonyms with the thought in mind that by doing so will get him/her the best of the best results from the Google engine – which is practically true more often than not.
Time will tell, how and what will be Google’s reactions to the feedbacks it will receive from this experiment, and, if ever the changes that Google expects us to notice or not notice be the ones included in the final product which is now known to the public as Caffeine.