I admit it. I’m addicted to the energizing wake-up effect of my morning coffee. The buzz that stimulates my brain, pumps adrenaline, and gets me moving every day is my cup of joe – my jolt of caffeine.
The folks at Google must feel the same way about their coffee. Either that, or they ‘woke up’ on their own.
With both Twitter and Facebook launching real time search engines, Google won’t be left behind. For the past few months, Google engineers have been working on the architecture for the ‘next-generation’ of Google search. Their new framework, codename Caffeine, promises to improve the speed, accuracy, size and comprehensiveness of the search experience.
It is a search engine’s job to:
1) Crawl countless numbers of web pages
2) Index the pages really well, and
3) Serve up the results fast
Those of us familiar with SEO know Google is always changing their algorithms. These algorithms determine the order in which search results are displayed. Caffeine, however, is an infrastructure change – and a HUGE one at that. Google is rewriting a large portion of their indexing system. The indexing system determines which pages will be displayed in the search results — not necessarily the order of the results. A web page must first be indexed by Google before it even has a chance to be displayed in the search results.
The new Google is FAST – about double the speed. Don’t believe me. Check out Caffeine for yourself. Google released a ‘developer version’ of the new search tool in order to gather feedback from the Search community. Most Google users won’t notice much of a difference at this point in time, but internet marketers and those focused on search optimization will and should expect to see changes in search results as well.
Mike McDonald of WebProNews did a great interview with Google engineer and evangelist, Matt Cutts (fyi – the good stuff starts at 1:17 seconds into the video). Matt shares how this infrastructure change is an ‘under the hood’ rework that will allow Google to be more powerful, flexible and robust in how they index sites going forward.
If you’re feeling a bit techie, you can also check out Google Webmaster Central’s Blog and read some feedback from the developer community.
Caffeine or no caffeine, Google Search is on the move.
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A great lesson from Google. Even when you’re number one, keep improving and work to stay ahead of the rest.