Google Caffeine: New version of Google search inbound

Major update in the works

11 August 2009 4:12 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Google has announced that it has been working on a "secret project" to improve the company's core product: its search engine.

"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," says Google on the company's blog.

Promising to “push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions,” in a move, uncharacteristic with Google, the company has reached out to webmasters and "power users" to help it test the new infrastructure to make sure there are no anomalies.

"Right now, we only want feedback on the differences between Google's current search results and our new system. We're also interested in higher-level feedback ("These types of sites seem to rank better or worse in the new system") in addition to "This specific site should or shouldn't rank for this query." Engineers will be reading the feedback, but we won't have the cycles to send replies," the company says on the blog.

Googler Matt Cutts says that the move isn't in response to recent search engine developments from Wolfram Alpha or even more recent moves by Facebook, but merely on the "focus [of] relentlessly on pushing our search quality forward".

The new search is available to all web users however currently won't work on mobiles or international versions of the website like Google.co.uk.

Via: googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

Full tags

Software, Search engines, Google