Back in August we wrote about the latest goings on over at Mountain View with the news that Google had been working behind the scenes on a new update for their Search Engine, codenamed Caffeine. A ripple of both anticipation and fear spread through those with a vested interest in the stability of the search engines, we might get more things, faster, but what will happen to the status quo? Fingers were crossed that it wouldn’t be “down, down, deeper and down” for the established listings we had built.
Google insisted that “the new infrastructure sits ‘under the hood’ of Google’s search engine, which means that most users wouldn’t notice a difference in search results”. However to alleviate fear, a web developers preview was opened to garner feedback from those power searchers who would notice any subtle changes in the listings and as such could offer Google information on the difference in positions from the current search results and those returned by the new system, as well as providing details on what sort of sites rank better or worse on Caffeine.
Well today saw the closure of this developer preview, like a sign in a shop window informing customers of an impending move to larger premises, so Google left us this note;
“Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.”
From this, I think it is fair to deduce that once the initial road test within one data centre is complete, Google will be rolling out Caffeine to a data centre near you, complete with the changes. So how will these changes affect you? Well, as previously mentioned, you will get more pages in a faster time, but as we barely venture past page 3 or 4, I guess it doesn’t matter whether we have 40 or 40m returned results and only the most alert of us will notice that these have been returned to us a 10th of a second faster. What I believe you will see, however, is more emphasis within the 10 blue links on Universal Search, with more relevant and up to date results will be returned through news, video, images, maps and shopping listings. So sites that provide information that is regularly updated will benefit along with those that encourage a level of engagement from their users.
As there is very little noise coming from Google, apart from the “cheerio, thanks for your help, we’ll see you soon” message on the Caffeine preview site, we can only speculate as to what will happen and when, so I will [please note that these are only the views of your author and are devoid of any hard evidence from Google]
- Google is only interested in returning the most relevant results, I suspect they felt that their listings were getting a bit cluttered with old news / spam and felt they were neglecting more relevant real time and universal content. Therefore, as long as your site contains good relevant content, Google will still like you, and if you create this content in varying formats, website, video, image, maps you could well see more results for your company within the listings.
- The festive season is upon us and Google has learned from the “Florida” updates of December 2003, where, if you remember, an algorithm change caused many sites to disappear, so it would surprise me if they start making drastic changes so close to Christmas when online retailers will be relying on stability. After all, Google’s motto is “Don’t Be Evil” so I’m sure they don’t intend to pull the rug from under the retailers feet, especially not in these trying times.
Which raises the question as to why now? Have they simply gathered enough information from us through the Caffeine developers preview that they simply don’t need us anymore? Or could there be a cheeky game of “one-upmanship” going on here? Now, I’m sure this is just my mind going into overdrive and recalling classic films of gamesmanship such as School for Scoundrels (the 1960 Terry Thomas original obviously) but Google has, over the past few months, done a very good job of stealing a rivals headlines and breaking the flow of their progress through the media.
You might have to bare with me on this one.
Back in August, the announcement of Google Caffeine coincided with the news of the June Beta launch of Bing in the UK, Microsoft’s latest search engine incarnation designed to try and topple the Mountain View giant. At a time when Bing was starting to gather a bit of momentum and people were starting to venture over to see what the fuss was about (granted through curiosity) Google revealed their bold future plans and wanted our help and feedback. In one move distracting us from our new flavour of the month and focused our minds back to what the future held for Google and our listings thereon. So with the news recently that Bing is to delay its UK launch and remain in beta until 2010 (citing their desire for more relevant UK listings before they stop testing) Google once again steals the column inches and blog posts by doing, well nothing really, except replacing a testing platform with a non-committal message of thanks and thus sending us all into a frenzy of questioning!
Coincidence? Maybe? Maybe not? Let’s discuss over coffee.
