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Industry Trends

Google Search Gets A Shot Of Caffeine

By August 13, 2009July 30th, 2023One Comment

When Microsoft Launches a new search engine, could Google be far behind? Of course not! Hot on the heels of BingTweets, Google announced on the Webmaster Central Blog that they will soon launch a new and upgraded version of their search engine.

Google claim that this new engine has been in the works for several months now and has nothing to with the launch of Bing by Microsoft. The claim is quite believable as it would hardly be possible to put together a new search engine in a matter of weeks.

Google has now released a developer’s preview of this new search engine to get user feedback in order to fine tune the product before the final launch.

This new version has been labeled ‘Caffeine’:

Search using Google Caffeine

Google has claimed that this new version of their search engine will be faster, more accurate and more comprehensive than before, even though the appearance of the search results page will continue to be the same as that of the old search results page. This improvement will be due to several technical changes which have been incorporated. The results will also be indexed in real-time, as the search engines of Twitter and Facebook are.

While they claim that the newer version is much faster than the older one, the actual difference in time will only be in fractions of a second, which will make no real difference to the average user, as he is hardly likely to actually measure whether the time taken to generate the results is 0.1 second or 0.2 seconds.

As far as accuracy and comprehensiveness are concerned, these are very subjective terms and so they may vary from search to search. While the new Google may provide better results for some searches, the older version may be better for others and indeed Bing may be better for yet others.

Whatever the changes may be, competition between search engines is certainly good for the user.