Google Caffeine’s mysterious appeal has been creating so much of a buzz all over the web since its announcement early this month. The announcement, which came with an invitation to test for feedback, was welcomed by a tremendous amount of response across the search engine optimization conscious blogosphere.
Since the improvements Google is offering its users, via Caffeine, is not visible on the outside, but rather on the inside, i.e. “size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions”, the fuel that powers the voluntary tests performed by power SEOs is consumed widely on spotting the difference between Caffeine’s new generation search infrastructure and the soon-to-be Google’s old system.
During my first test, Caffeine’s speed in displaying search results was either equal or slower than Google’s current system.
On the third day, Google’s Matt Cutts, had an interview with WebProNews, where he said, “…we’ve been shooting to get them pretty close, so most people won’t notice a difference…”. You can watch the video from that interview below.
It was the same day Matt Cutts announced on Twitter that Caffeine is being pulled down temporarily for data center upgrades.
When it came back, Caffeine became faster and search results got better.
Moreover, on an interview with the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM), the day before that temporary shut down, Sean Quinlan, Google’s lead software storage engineer, revealed that Caffeine is also being tested with a new storage file system in it. Apparently, this new storage file system, according to the article, is “an overhaul of the Google File System (GFS)”.
“But GFS supports some applications better than others. Designed for batch-oriented applications such as web crawling and indexing, it’s all wrong for applications like Gmail or YouTube, meant to serve data to the world’s population in near real-time.”
On another article, which Michelle MacPhearson wrote, it has been noted that Caffeine is showing an improved algorithm in the way Google crawls and index information particularly with social media content.
“Real time information (Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook) seem to rank higher than previously. This could indicate that Google feels searches want to most recent (and relevant) results rather than older information, and could also be a reaction to the ever-growing numbers of people joining and publishing content on social media sites.“
You can read the three-part story on the Google File System (GFS) here.
I like testing Caffeine and comparing search results with the current system on their own respective separate servers, however, there is this cool way of querying them both simultaneously and here is the site for you to have fun doing just that (includes Bing and Yahoo engines).
More updates on Google Caffeine coming your way here being part of Cybertegic’s SEO services so please do check back.