If you follow the SEO chatter, you no doubt have heard about Google’s latest unveiling, a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search.
If you run to the Google search sandbox to try out the new engine, you probably won’t notice much of a change, in fact Matt Cutts wrote:
The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure. But some of the search results do change, so we wanted to open up a preview so that power searchers and web developers could give us feedback.
The two biggest gains that seem to be showing up is faster results and a bigger index. I couldn’t find a single instance where new Google to longer to return results that current Google.
The pure number of pages that show up as indexed also was astonishing. I hadn’t even noticed this one until I saw Ben Parr’s post at Mashable on the caffeine update.
Perhaps the easiest to test, we can tell the index size based on how many results come up for specific search. Here are searches once again for “dog:”
New:
Old:
Bing:
Google has done a good job with this update, and I’m glad they’re feeling the heat from Bing. As usual, competition is pushing these two heavyweights to make their products better.
Jacob Stoops says
Can’t wait to see what’s in store for Google’s Caffeine update! I think ultimately they’re trying to improve their crawlers to the point where they can index information instantaneously.
Phil says
I don’t think there’s any doubt about that Jacob. Google is feeling the “real-time” heat that is building.
Tools like Twitter and Facebook are only adding to the speed in which they are trying to accomplish it.