Google has unveiled, of what is being perceived as a next major overhaul of their search engine indexing algorithm and named it Caffeine. Google has also providing a developer preview of the working variant of this new engine. Post and comments from Matt Cutts suggest that Google’s Caffeine update primarily deals with the way Google indexes, crawls and ranks the pages of websites.
“It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions,” says a joint post from engineers Matt Cutts and Sitaram Iyer. “Web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”
While the biggest visible changes in Microsoft’s re-launched search engine, Bing, are user-interface; Google is working towards retaining the user-interface and overhauling the mechanism of indexing pages.
In blog-sphere, opinions differ on how the new algorithm effects the Google’s Caffeine update affects the algorithm. For the sample searches I did there are some notable differences in the way results appear.
For instance a search for “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” on the current engine and the developer preview [http://www2.sandbox.google.com/] of Caffeine provided by Google and came back with mixed views.
Current Engine shows News Results on the Top, Videos towards the mid and Images towards the mid.
Caffeine Engine shows us News Results on the Top, Videos towards the Bottom and Images ignored.
We don’t find many User Interface or cosmetic changes.
What apparently changes is:
- Number of results
- Time taken to pull them out
- The position/ranks of results is apparently different, more so on second and consequent pages
We shall find more disambiguates as people dig deeper. One thing is for sure, this news is going to create quiet an anxiety in the webmaster communities.