Google’s New and Improved Search System May Give Web Publishers a Caffeine Headache   - 1,019 Views,

Google has officially confirmed the new search engine juju on which they’ve been working, previously in secret, for the past several months, now code-named “Caffeine”. Google Caffeine provides a new search infrastructure and algorithms that are intended to provide enhanced indexing speed, accuracy, and “comprehensiveness”, among other things, according to Google. Now Google is inviting folks to test Google Caffeine and rate it against old-formula Google, which we hereby dub Google Decaf.

1. Crawl a large chunk of the web.
2. Index the resulting pages and compute how reputable those pages are.
3. Rank and return the most relevant pages for users’ queries as quickly as possible.”

While its not clear whether Google itself feels that it had fallen down on any of these three steps, they clearly are looking to improve how they do it.

Hence Caffeine.

How much of an improvement Google Caffeine is over Google Decaf remains to be seen.

Explain Cutts and Iyer, “Some parts of this system aren’t completely finished yet, so we’d welcome feedback on any issues you see.”

The way you provide feedback is by actually testing out Caffeine - which looks just like the Google search page we all know and love, but uses the new caffeinated code and infrastructure.

Google Caffeine’s User Interface Looks Just the Same - It’s What’s Inside that Counts:

Here are the results of a couple of searches we ran, testing Google Caffeine against Google Decaf; note the difference not only in the first few listings for each, but also in the total number of results:

Results for “how to whitelist in gmail” with regular Google (’Google Decaf’):

Results for “how to whitelist in gmail” with Google Caffeine:

Results for “redownload itunes purchases” with Google Decaf:

Results for “redownload itunes purchases” with Google Caffeine:

Now, here is something that so far has been little talked about, but is very interesting to note - and very important for anyone who does any web publishing: it would appear that web publishers who have been careful to craft their messages specifically so that people searching for information with a particular set of search terms, or key words or phrases, will find that information on their sites may now find that all bets are off when it comes to whether that will ensure that the searchers find them any more. For example, under the current Google search system, to which we ourselves have tuned many of our pages so that people can find the information we provide, if you search for “redownload itunes purchases”, our article about how to, well, redownload iTunes purchases comes up first, as you might expect it to.

However, with Google Caffeine, a search for “redownload itunes purchases”, while still putting our article up near the top, has it down at number 4, even though ours is the only one with a subject which clearly includes all of the search terms. We’re not complaining, mind you - just pointing out that while Google Caffeine may be a boon for Google end-users, if you are a web publisher, you may end up with a Caffeine headache.

Want to try it yourself? Here’s what Google says to do: “Do a search at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says “Dissatisfied? Help us improve.” Click on that link, type your feedback in the text box and then include the word caffeine somewhere in the text box. Thanks in advance for your feedback!”