Google is putting Caffeine in its search engine, and it could be a wake-up call for businesses to tune up their Web sites. The previously secret project, announced Monday on the company's Webmaster Central Blog, is intended to provide the "next-generation architecture" for Google's Web search, especially as Microsoft's Bing, a reinvigorated Yahoo, and Wolfram Research's Wolfram Alpha gear up, reports Yahoo tech.
'Under the Hood' Infrastructure
This new infrastructure is part of the "under the hood" infrastructure, and the company said "most users won't notice a difference in search results." But it did predict that "power searches" and Web developers will notice the difference, which is why the company is asking for developer feedback.
Caffeine isn't finished yet, Google said, but apparently it's completed enough to be made available for public testing. The developer preview is available at http://www2.sandbox.google.com.
In the blog posting, the Google engineers said they are primarily interested in any perceived differences between the current search engine and the Caffeine-enriched one. They said this includes higher-level feedback, such as whether types of sites appear to rank better or worse in the new system, or if a given site shouldn't be showing up for a specific query.
'See How It Evolves'
The exact nature of the differences that users are expected to see were not described by Google, but any differences in how Google presents results could have a substantial impact on businesses, especially those whose traffic and sales are directly dependent on Google results.
