Google working on brand new infrastructure for search

Tue 11 August 2009 10:00, Dennis Sievers

This week Google announced that they are rewriting the infrastructure of Google's search engine, called Caffeine for now. The update will have a strong focus on renewing the crawling, indexing and ranking process, and will only have a small impact on the GUI. Google has opened a test version of the search engine for collecting feedback on the results. Although the test version is primarily for .com users, it is possible to switch to your own language to see some local results. In Holland, for instance, we can add the country parameter to see Dutch results.

So, what can we expect from this new infrastructure? A few first tests make clear that:

the new infrastructure seems to load faster in many cases
less use of universal search elements, although that will probably change on short term, as Google is blending more and more results.
still no focus on real-time search. Google probably will buy Twitter short term, as Facebook is teaming up with Friendfeed.
pages with the keywords up front in the title of the page seem to rank a bit higher
more brands are moving up

Of course, Google will be working on this update for a while, so the current results probably will change over time. Nonetheless, it is funny to see that everytime a competitor like Yahoo, Microsoft or Facebook announces something big, Google seems to 'launch' something big too. When Microsoft came with Bing, "bang", Google came with Wave. When Wolfram came out, Google Squared came out. Now Facebook is teaming up with Friendfeed and is launching their realtime search, Google is working on a new infrastructure.

Is Google just playing on the field of marketing, or do they truly follow their own development agenda?

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Comments (2)

- Bas van den Beld
- [website]
Google does make a smart move again when it comes to market share and keeping the users hanging on to Google as their default search engine. Where Bing is trying to get people to search with nice features, new designs and even hard cash, Google is trying to improve the search results. And isn't that what search is all about?

Tue 11 Aug 2009, 10:18
- Dennis Sievers
- [website]
Hi Bas,

You're right. The user is not searching because of his need to search, but because of his need to find an answer. A beautiful interface is great, but when searchers don't find what they are looking for, or don't find it fast enough, they will go elsewhere to satisfy their needs.

Search is a problem solving matter. And nobody wants to have problems unsolved.

Tue 11 Aug 2009, 10:24

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