Google has unveiled a new version of its search engine which it says will be faster and more accurate than ever before. This new architecture appears to include crawling, indexing, and ranking changes. For the first time, Google isn’t simply incorporating these changes into their existing infrastructure or replacing it. This search engine is called ‘Caffeine’. (check it here: www2.sandbox.google.com)

While the biggest visible changes in Microsoft’s relaunched search engine, Bing, are user-interface related, Google’s new search is only infrastructure related and includes no UI changes. On first glance, however, the underlying infrastructure changes do seem to have impacted user interface as it relates to universal search (likely because universal results are influenced by ranking and relevance signals). For the sample searches I did, the first ten results were fairly similar, but the existence and location of images, video, news, and blog posts was notably different. Before you run off and try to re-learn SEO, give Caffeine a test run. It looks like most people haven’t found major search result differences between Caffeine and the old version of Google. I found a couple of shuffled results during my own testing, but nothing major. If you have any kind of online presence, I encourage you to try out the searches that are important to you. I postulate that only the minority of people will experience negative search consequences from Caffeine (note: international/mobile results still look undeveloped). While this test was nowhere near scientific, we do have some solid takeaways:

New Google is FAST: It often doubled the speed of Google classic. New Google relies more on keywords: SEO professionals, your job just got a lot harder. The algorithm’s definitely different. It has more reliance on keyword strings to produce better results. Search is moving into real-time: Being able to get info on breaking events is clearly a priority for Google and Bing. With both Twitter and Facebook launching real-time search engines, they needed to respond. It’s partially a response to Bing: At least, that’s how we feel. This new search has a focus on increasing speed, relevancy, accuracy, and the index volume, things that Microsoft really hit on when it released Bing. It feels as if Google “Caffeine” is meant to shore up any deficiencies it may have when compared to Microsoft’s offering, though it’s been in the works long before Bing launched.

The new Google will only get better as features are implemented and developed. The end result is a better search experience for the user. Competition really does breed innovation. “Google’s Caffeine is undoubtedly faster, almost twice as fast at times. It’s like a Google Gti,” he said. “The launch of Bing has been a good thing, although unfortunately more for Google than Bing if the level of innovation continues at this frantic pace. Google is still very much in the driving seat and is still setting the pace.” Google Caffeine will cause quite a kerfluffle in the web developer and search engine optimization world and many will dive in to try and figure out the changes. We’ll likely see many a speculative blog post about how best to optimize for the new infrastructure, but my guess is that it likely does what Google search does, but better. And the foundational elements of having a crawlable infrastructure and compelling content remain.