Google Caffeine – Future of Google Web Search

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers have been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.

The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences.

This new search tool (codenamed: Caffeine) is functional and a pre-beta release of it is available at www2.sandbox.google.com. My overall take on Caffeine is as follows:

1. Speed and Index size is definitely an improvement. In some cases, the results are returned in half the time with almost double the number of estimated results.
2. Search is more real-time with Caffeine. When queried for names of individuals, one can clearly view the latest Twitter updates too. This is in clear response to capture the ‘breaking news’ market where FaceBook and Twitter (and even Bing) are trying their hands at.
3. There seems to be a major tweak in the keyword matching algorithm which is good for searchers, but makes it even more difficult for SEO professionals to catch up.

In the coming week, I will do a more detailed and a hands on review of this tool and post my observations.

(Source: Google Webmaster Central Blog)

(Image Credits: TechTree.com)