As we see both Microsoft and Yahoo! finding their feet with their new search deal it seems that Google has been hatching it’s own plan. They have secretively been working on a new architecture for their search, know as the ‘Caffeine’ update.
Currently the new architecture is only really seen by ‘power users’ and web developers, which would make sense if it’s purely technical changes they’ve been making, but will anyone else see a difference? And is this just covering up other big changes or just causing a distraction? Well, Google have released the architecture for previewing and testing by developers and power Googlers and can take the new caffeinated search for a ride at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/. But what changes have really been made?
So internet search geeks are probably going to notice changes in the new architecture. But the vast majority of people? Probably not. Google said the changes would only be noticeable to “power users” but since they don’t always make announcements about what they’re testing (or when algorithm updates occur) could there be more to this update than just coding? Could this be hiding an algorithm update or some other big changes?
Here is an outline of some of the changes seen so far in various different niches with the ‘new Google’:
- Very slight de-emphasis on Wikipedia which should make many SEOs happy.
- It is faster. Although far fewer pages are indexed which would suggest a much smaller set of data.
- The icons for commenting, promoting, and removing results are removed but those are only available when you’re signed in anyway.
- There’s some mixing up of the top ten, but nothing more than the average SEO sees in a days’ work.
- News stays.
- Brands move up.
- Shopping and Books results are missing.
- YouTube, Book, and Image results are killed.
- With more real-time searches the video results get pushed up.
- No real emphasis on real-time search, such as Tweets.
The new Google is strangely familiar. But is it all just smoke and mirrors?
“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.” – Matt Cutts on the Caffeine Update
So Matt Cutts says no and that this is mostly just code-based. But he also said that code changes all the time at Google, so why the announcement? Why the developer preview? They couldn’t test any of this the way they experiment with everything else?
Additionally, Google wants feedback on whether the results are different. Why? Surely they could test that. Whatever Google’s intentions are with the new architecture, they’re being as cryptic as ever. You can hardly blame them when they need to keep proprietary secrets. But with such subtle changes you have to wonder what is really going on and if it really is a distraction from the hype around the new search merger?
You can read the full post here, originally posted by Nathania Johnson at the Search Engine Watch Blog.
