14 DAY TRIAL // Google has started to roll out its upgraded search engine index Caffeine which is now live at one data center. Google announced that it would gradually introduce Caffeine to the main search engine after it closed down the sandbox which it set up for the project. There were no announcements at the time as when to expect the move to take place and, in fact, there haven't been any announcement this time around either, but the company has confirmed that the roll-out is in progress.
The thing started with several people noticing changes in the search results rankings of their sites. The altered search results were coming from a single IP address which lead people to speculate that it could have something to do with Google's upcoming search infrastructure update and that the company may be finally rolling it out. Turns out they were partially right, the results did indeed come from a data center running Caffeine, but Google is holding off on a wider release for the moment.
“So 209.85.225.103 does hit the Caffeine data center more often than other IP addresses, but it's always been the plan that Caffeine would roll out at one data center (no more data centers will get Caffeine until at least January),” Google's Matt Cutts explained.
“But I would avoid generalizing, at least as going by the one report that mentioned a specific site that I looked into. Of course, on a lot of the webmaster forums you can't tell what site they're talking about, so it's hard to do any debugging on what might have happened to individual sites there,” he added.
The address in question is 209.85.225.103 and right now you have a 50 percent chance of getting the Caffeine-powered Google search by using it. There's also a small chance that you'll get served by that data center even when doing a regular search. However, for the moment, Google is holding off the big roll-out until after the holidays to make sure it doesn't interfere with one of the busiest periods of the year for search.