Caffeine

Over the past few months, Google has been working on a new update to their search platform. And last week, Google Caffeine was launched for us to test out. Here is the new testing location where users can try the new algorithms and see how much quicker the search results are returned: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

Thus far, SEOs and search enthusiasts have been doing their research as to what differences are being noticed between the old Google search and Caffeine. There is also a site up on the web right now which allows you to notice the difference in a real-time result of making a search on Google vs. on Caffeine, located at http://www.comparecaffeine.com/ .

From what I have read and from what I have done for testing thus far, this new update returns result much faster than before. Granted, it is only milliseconds between the two search result sites, but still impressive nonetheless. From a user perspective, most searchers won't be noticing much of a difference between Caffeine and regular old Google, as people over at Google have said that the changes to search in Caffeine are changes "under the hood" and are these changes are geared more toward the infrastructure of how they produce search results.

As Google is shifting to sites that are more brand-focused, I believe we are going to see more weight given to authority sites in their respective vertical. The verdict is still out on what this holds for the SEO world, but I am sure that we are going to have an even more difficult time in the future to achieve rankings. The research is still developing for Caffeine, and while looking into a client query on how 301 redirects were going to handled by this new search, found very little help on the subject. I did, however, figure out that Caffeine needs to work on their filters. While making a search on the 301 subject, I used both Google and Caffeine to get information. To my surprise, both search engines failed at blocking spyware sites in the SERPs that I haven't seen in years. Hopefully, they can get rid of this garbage that continues to clog up search results with useless doorway pages.