Google Caffeine....

The secret project first came to light in August 2009, when the Google’s search engineers publicly invited web developers to test the new version of the search engine and give their feedback. However, the company has now taken down the developer preview web page and replaced it with an announcement declaring Google Caffeine will go live in its first data centre soon.

The statement thanks all the people who have tested out the new back end technology, intended to speed up indexing and reduce the time between new content being published online and it then appearing in a Google search result.

The full statement says: “Based on the success we've seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data centre. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.”

Google owns and operate more than two dozen data centres around the world, each containing hundreds of thousands of servers. When somebody performs a Google search, the engine decides which data centre to send the query to. When project Caffeine goes live, certain people will be able to experience the effects of the new technology if their particular search query is sent to the data centre which has been upgraded.

A Google spokesman would not reveal the exact timing of the roll out nor the location of which data centre Caffeine will be activated in. However, people’s Google search queries are not always sent to their geographically closest data centre – and so it is impossible to predict who will reap the benefits of the new technology when it goes live.

Matt Cutts, a principal engineer at Google and Sitaram Iyer, a staff software engineer posted an entry on the company’s webmaster central blog in August appealing to developers to try the newly improved service and send them 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,” he said.

“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. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

Improving the speed of its search technology is crucially important to Google and other search engines at the moment. Last month, both Google and Microsoft announced partnerships with Twitter, in order to integrate real-time results into their main search indexes. The pursuit of real-time search results is a hot issue for search engine companies in a bid to make their services as fast and reliable as possible.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...-roll-out.html

Interesting stuff, it seems with this new launch of their search algorythm, they have proven that there actually HAS been a sandbox in effect for some time despite a few people publicly saying there was not one and it also seems like Google are going to be totally changing how they index, crawl and display site listings in their engine.

Has anyone already noticed any changes on their SEO results?

Regards,

Lee

As I understood Caffeine is just an infrastructure project which they roll out to their data centers.

A change in the algorithm is quite close to follow up me thinks.

Another thing Google works on is this (Python unladen-swallow) - a faster implementation of Python combined with compiling the source code or JIT .... this should speed up their MapReduce implementation temendously giving them more CPU time to do their magic :D

I haven't noticed a difference on caffeine yet, but my understanding is that it's not fully functional until the new year.

I'm more concerned about Google activating "Personalized Search for everyone" this Friday. They make a huge change and just blog to notify everyone.

If all the top spots get taken by previous clicks, and not relevant search results that can change now and again, it seems to me the search results, over time, will become diluted right?

hi Mr. P :D

the search results are already diluted by your language, your location (all the way down to your city), other environment information of your browser and by datacenter of google itself which holds diffent aged datas in each datacenter. It might also be fluctuating by the common trends (see google trends) for that given "season" for your keyword (a search for "presents" gives relevant sites for "christmas presents" - I'll set a reminder to check for "presents" on valentines day).

Google will most likely not populate your top 10 spots with your top 10 visited sites for a given keyword as that would not make sense for finding new exciting stuff for you which you might like more and which would be more relevant... Other users will have a different order of results... I bet THAT makes a difference, though.

DEV