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 Search engine giant Google has created quite a buzz with their newly overhauled search engine, code named “Caffeine.” Google claims that the new search tool will improve the speed, accuracy, and size of a Google search. In contrast to Microsoft’s revamped search engine, Bing, whose changes are mainly user-interface related, Google’s new search function is based on changes to its infrastructure. While its name is synonymous with searching the Internet to the point of a becoming a generic verb for performing a web search, Google is not without a competition. One push for "Caffeine" may have come from the outside: Microsoft has made it known that its Bing search engine is going to be the force behind organic search results for Google rival Yahoo! Other speculation about the Caffeine update is that it is aimed at competing with recent moves made by social media players Facebook(which has recently acquired FriendFeed) and Twitter, which has the ability to perform real time searches. Google has said the that project means an overhaul of its indexing system, or the process that creates a database of all known websites, together with the metadata used to describe them. This change is expected to cut down on the time it takes Google to index documents and allow them to be searchable. The company has said that Caffeine is not an effort to change the way that its index is used to generate the results of a search, however. The new infrastructure is said to run below the surface of Google's search engine. For most users, that means there won’t be much, if any, difference in search results. But it seems Google believes web developers and power searchers might notice a change in the way the search engine operates. Rather than rely on post-release feedback, Google is conducting a taste test of sorts: It is incorporating pre-release usability testing on a large scale by providing a developer preview before spring the product on the general public. For online businesses that rely on Google to draw web searchers to their sites, it remains to be seen how the new algorithm will change the mix of organic search and pay per click traffic. Google’s historic preeminence in web searches has been due at least in part to using algorithms to figure the value of content—what search results represent the best answer to a user’s question, which advertisements are optimized to show on a given page, and which news articles are most worth a reader’s attention. Google’s organic and paid search listings are two separate categories and a web site’s performance in one does not correlate with the ranking on the other. Caffeine, however, may cause enough jitters for some businesses that they consider cutting their risk from relying on a sole search engine and diversifying by starting new campaigns on Yahoo!, Microsoft adCenter, or Business.com. Ultimately, it’s likely that any changes in the popular consumption of the caffeinated Google will be a matter of personal preference: will it be a habit, an addiction, or will it just leave an aftertaste? |
