In a weeny expresso cup, by the Styrofoam bucketful, all the colours of the rainbow, injected directly into my eyeballs – I’ll take it any which way – I’m not a coffee snob. Google also seems to appreciate the drug in all its manic wonder, dubbing its new search algorithm and index update, “Caffeine”, accompanied by an equally insane visual representation of the new indexing system that makes your eyes go a bit funny.
The changes, apparently “imperceptible to users”, have been implemented to increase the real time relevance of searches when dealing with the 400 million+ queries Google is faced with each day. The result is a faster, more accurate, relevant outcome to a search, from a much bigger index – in fact, “the largest collection of web content” Google has ever offered.
Results do seem to appear up to twice as fast as ‘old Google’, and are meant to be more up to date – pulling content from a constantly-crawled web (in little sections simultaneously rather than trying to do the whole shebang in one go) which means the findings are ‘real-time’ as opposed to potentially being from a two week old index. Caffeine is able to index hundreds of thousands of parallel pages per second. Google geeks – go take a cold shower.
Searches are also more focused on analysing what Google believes the searcher is really looking for – phrases and keyword strings – rather than individual keywords. This is to incorporate the influx of multimedia that the web is infused with – video, images, music, social media etc, and to second-guess what else the user might want to know.
Google Vice-President of Engineering, Udi Manber explains: “People’s expectations have grown. Ten years ago, when you looked for something and found it, you’d be really impressed. Now when you don’t immediately find what you want, you think something’s broken.”
Ok, so we’re spoilt. Some might say a result in 0.13 rather than 0.25 seconds is not going to make a vast amount of difference to your average searcher, but the larger indexing system and more targeted results surely will. “…Search is ‘give me what I need, not what I said’. And the way people express themselves is often very different from what they need,” says Manber. Like when you drink so much coffee you start believing you can read people’s minds… Perhaps that’s just me. And Google.
With regard to SEO, how is this going to change the way online marketers work? Improved, ‘real time’ analytics? A push to use a wider range of key-phrases and related keywords rather than relying on targeted ones? Focusing on multi- and social media to produce extra/higher ranked results on SERPs? After the Mayday algorithm change, it seems search is becoming ever more specific, more accurate, which is fair to be expected given the ever-expanding nature of the internet universe. Let us know your thoughts on the affects Caffeine will have on the world of search.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Kittu K, Ikroh SEO. Ikroh SEO said: Need a caffeine hit this Monday morning? Well Google's got one for ya: http://www.ikroh.com/seo-blog/?p=619 [...]