14 DAY TRIAL // Google is the king of search with a comfortable roughly 70 percent share of the market and it's not likely this will change anytime soon. Still, with the competition heating up, in terms of features at least even if it's not actually making a dent in the market share, the company isn't sitting down and is getting ready to launch a major overhaul of its search engine's infrastructure. Dubbed “Caffeine,” the project is now ready for public scrutiny and Google is inviting web developers and power users to try it out and provide some feedback.
“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions,” Sitaram Iyer, staff software engineer, and Matt Cutts, principal engineer, wrote. “The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results.”
The company is always updating its software, constantly adding new small features and sometimes even greater ones and this is true for every project, from the Chrome web browser to its search engine. This is why Google saying it's releasing a new version is major news, since the company very rarely undertakes a major overhaul of its technology, preferring incremental upgrades.
Curious users can test the new architecture at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ but they may not notice any change at first. The interface is completely unchanged, with all the updates being under the hood. The speed isn't noticeably faster either, but most users would be hard pressed to notice an improvement of a few milliseconds anyway.
Google claims most of the changes are aimed at faster page indexing and it may involve some changes in how the search engine determines authority so web masters should get ready for different rankings. Still, there are changes on the user side as well; for one there are significantly more results in some of the searches, though going from 600 million to 800 million results is pretty much moot. One change that may have the greatest impact is the emphasis on real-time results, which the new engine seems to have, as Google has admitted that it's getting outmaneuvered in this area by services like Twitter or the recently acquired FriendFeed.