A new iPhone release, the latest comments on a holiday destination, sometimes you need the latest information written and published in seconds. What if advertiser targeted the audience searching for recent information? Imagine if the Google search results contained all web-content and mixed content published only minutes ago. Google are trialling how they can get closer to making this a reality, in their new “next-generation” search engine update Caffeine.
Caffeine is a new update for Google’s search that brings Google closer to some of its rivals in speed and exceeds most in content coverage. It lists or indexes more pages and finds pages published minutes rather than half an hour ago.
Giving people what they search for first time is a Google objective. Larry Page one of the founders of Google admitted at the Zeitgeist conference in May said that he had “… always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real time search.” but developments have been relatively slow. Google fails to include pages that were published within the last 15 minutes consistently therefore users looking for fresh content are not going to use Google. Others relating to listing real-time content in a more timely and comprehensive manner are also addressed in the new update such as increasing the efficiency of the backend systems that index pages, which is required to keep reducing the indexing speed. Larry’s comments come as it’s competitors are already building real-time information users.
The recent announcement of Google to update its algorithm with its Caffeine release is suggesting it does see a threat to its core search algorithm from real time search engines and social media. “This update is primarily under the hood” states Matt Cutts who is quick to establish the fix it will add to its normally sluggish updates to its index. Many website owners have been frustrated in sitting in the Google Sandbox or new pages not being included in Google’s search index, Caffeine will change all this as well as include more recent, real time content published on the internet.
Key points:
- Google is rewriting the architecture of its algorithm – changing the way that it crawls and indexes web pages.
- Search results will be returned nearly twice as fast with Caffeine
- The size of Google’s content network has increased.
- With increased indexing speed and a larger network to crawl, Google hopes that search queries will return search results with a greater degree of accuracy than the current algorithm architecture allows.
The impact of this update is yet to be seen, however possible outcomes could be:
- Caffeine could rely more on keyword strings to produce more accurate results
- Possibly a stronger weighting on domain authority and a greater understanding of synonyms
- Universal Search results such as videos may also gain less exposure with Caffeine (appearing further down the SERPs). We believe this is temporary.
For now, Google will keep Caffeine in preview mode (test it here http://www2.sandbox.google.com.) and keep testing its impact. Matt Cutts suggested the possibility of rolling the full update out in one data centre before a national launch.
