Google have announced a new infrastructure for their search engine codenamed "Caffeine". They are inviting developers and power users to help test out the new infrastructure which will allow them to "push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions".

So what is "Caffeine" about?

The new search engine infrastructure is a secret project that a large team of "Googlers" has been working on for "several months". Whether they are responding to Microsoft's latest offering in Bing is unclear and it may have been something that has been in the pipeline for a lot longer. Unlike previous updates, Google are announcing that this is a completely new architecture and isn't actually built on their existing infrastructure and as such you will need to go to http://www2.sandbox.google.com to try out the new search engine.

Apparently, most standard users won't notice much of a difference in search results but Google assure us that if you are viewing the results as a webmaster, developer or a power user then you should see some subtle differences in the actual results returned and how they are presented. Once you have performed your new search, if you would like to help Google with any improvements, a link will be presented at the bottom of the page entitled "Dissatisfied? Help us improve" and you can use that form to air your views (remember to include the word "caffeine" in the subject line though).

How do the results differ?

As far as we can see, not a lot! There are some differences though, and whether this is just whilst it is in development we're not sure, but there were no sponsored links appearing in any of the searches we did. Also, there are some differences in the actual results that are returned. For example, searching for "Website Design Darlington" or "Web Design Darlington" produces the following results in Google "Caffeine":

Notice the two bottom websites? Well, in the standard Google search they don't appear at all on the front page (or in fact in the first 10 pages that I checked!) so there are obviously some major algorithms changes when they work out what is a relevant or appropriate result to show.

As an SEO company, this is something we'll really have to keep an eye on and maybe even start to perform SEO based on the results we see in the "caffeine" sandbox.

Mark Smith
MDS Solutions - Darlington Web Design