Google to Launch a New Version of Google Search (Google Caffeine):
The project’s still under construction, but Google’s now confident enough in the new version of its search engine that it has released the development version for public consumption. While you won’t see too many differences immediately, let us assure you: it’s a completely upgraded Google search.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
After announcing the creation of a new search index last August, Google finally released its more comprehensive, faster, real time search index, Google Caffeine, this month. There are plenty of pros and cons to this new engine, but the overall goal is to produce more accurate and more relevant search results at a much faster speed. For webmasters and SEO professionals, this has the potential to present an entirely new set of challenges and obstacles to optimizing for the search engine results.
The New Google
Caffeine, as the name implies, is an added jolt to Google’s already successful search engine and search index. In an effort to index more of the web, and provide more relevant results for each query, Caffeine is utilizing real-time search traffic that previously only encompassed breaking news stories. With Twitter and Facebook creating millions of updates each day, the old Google’s day-or-two delay is no longer good enough. With the increase of semantic search, factors of local SEO and localized keywords are sure to play a major role in the new Google as well.
Effects on Users
Google has continuously stated that the changes are based mostly in the infrastructure, indexing, and speed, which means the accuracy and relevancy of results should increase. So far, changes to your specific web design and site structure do not appear imminent, and your overall Google use experience will probably not change much at all.
* Page Load Time: Incorporating speed means that page load times are going to come into play more than in the past. While it is standard to have a low page load time, somewhere around two seconds or so, this low time is even more important with the extra caffeine jolt.
* Keywords and Phrases: The relevancy of keywords is now more important than it has been in the past. This just means more work for your SEO campaign. While this poses a challenge to some SEO professionals, it may also filter out some of the sites that are more about spam and SEO than they are about the quality of content they produce for their visitors.
* Ads: It seems that your PPC management will become more important as well. Caffeine puts more emphasis on organic search results, rather than paid advertisements, so the ads that you do pursue are even more individually important. The emphasis on page load time further affects your PPC management, since load time affects your Quality Score for AdWords.
What it All Means
Generally speaking, we can expect Caffeine to do what Google has always done, just better. The basics of optimization will stay familiar, but some of the details and advanced techniques are going to be a little different. For the most part, things on the user’s side will remain the same, while the major changes will take place behind the scenes. Since that is exactly where SEO professionals tend to work, this new technology may provide some interesting challenges for seasoned webmasters.
Google isn’t exactly doing this to fend off the competition, but rather as a way to keep up with user’s needs. Other forms of search, such as Bing, Yahoo, and even Twitter and Facebook, are sure to catch up soon enough, but for now, Google is, as usual, ahead of the curve.
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