Google Caffeine: Top Things You Need To Know

There is a big buzz going on about some new changes that’s happening in the No. 1 Search Engine in the world-Google.

This is something that people from the web development industry, online business owners, internet marketers and especially those very much concerned with SEO to know about.

So what’s the big buzz?

Google has just announced the completion of the “the next-generation architecture of Google’s web search” called Caffeine, last June 8, 2010.

Google Caffeine is a new web indexing system that hopefully will take web searching to greater heights. This is designed to improve how Google provides search results by analyzing smaller portions of the web, making it faster, and updating the search index more frequently to give fresher results.

So why did Google build Caffeine?

As we all know, more and more users have come to use the World Wide Web. As the number of users grow, so as the number of web contents being created online. With the introduction of images, videos, news, audios and other real-time updates these growing number of web content is now more complex. Not to mention the increase of demands and expectations from users like searchers wanting the most updated and relevant search results, while web content publishers want their work to be found as soon as they publish it.

This fast web evolution and high user expectations made Google to gather its team of experts to work on this big step of “re-architecting or rewriting” a large part of how Google index web pages.

As what we read at the Official Google Blog, Caffeine allows Google to index web pages on a remarkable level. Actually, it works on hundreds of thousands of web pages along side each other each second. Caffeine uses up almost 100 million gigabytes of storage space in one database as well as provides fresh data at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes each day. Google even compared it with like using 625,000 of the biggest iPods in order to hold that great deal of information.

Google built Caffeine already considering all future possibilities they have in mind in terms of speed, power and usability ready for further growth of online information plus integration to Google’s different products and services. Also this may be a means of eliminating sites or pages dominating search results by too much manipulation of the algorithm.

What’s going to be the impact of Google Caffeine to us users?

As what we understand on what Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, explained on one of his interviews: Google Caffeine is designed to give better, faster, and more updated search results but with less noticeable changes for regular users. Though, as he said that with this big change it would be hard to get exact same results with the older system.

“The idea of Caffeine is that it tries to be a lot more powerful, a lot more flexible and a lot more robust in how we index, so that let’s you in theory scale up to a lot more of documents, but also allows you to index those documents a lot faster so it’s going to be so powerful”, said Matt Cutts on an interview at San Jose with Mike McDonald of WebProNews.

With the web developer and search engine optimization world this change might bring about more changes or technical adjustments and whole new stuff to consider. Though for now no one outside of Google can determine exactly what these changes would be - one thing is for sure though, we can see that there will be a lot of write ups coming out based on different speculations on how this new system is going to work.

So speaking of speculations, we searched the web for feedbacks of users on what they think Caffeine does to search results, what are the suspected changes, setbacks (if there’s any), and so on. And please note that everything listed are still assumptions and personal views of different individuals that don’t necessarily agree with one another or may differ in ideas. It’s up to you to judge or see for yourself if you get the same results or not.

Speculative Changes Of Caffeine Based On Feedbacks From Users:

• There is a strong observation of Google Caffeine bringing up more localized search results; that it is now detecting the searcher’s IP and location of its ISP to give targeted results based on current location.

• It seems that Google Caffeine is giving more preference to “authority web sites” a lot more than before, making these sites harder to beat in terms of competition on long tail keywords and phrases.

• Google Caffeine is indexing a lot more of the World Wide Web. On preliminary testing, it seems that Google Caffeine is actually indexing more and more web pages. But some think this is only established on a confined amount of site:domain.com evaluations. So this is still to be confirmed.

• There are people reporting that Google Caffeine would seem to increase Wikipedia results.  But perhaps it will depend on the specific search query.

• Search is shifting directly into real-time results, but Google might have dialed up way too much emphasis on Twitter according to some.

• A few .gov websites obtained reduced rankings for primary keywords and phrases.

• There are others reporting that Google Caffeine is actually presenting extra weight to domains having no hyphens within them. While others are not really finding a significant focus upon non-hyphenated keyword loaded domains. There are others also reporting that Hyphenated-keyword-domains are doing much better on a side-by-side comparison with popular SERPs.

• Google might be treating 301 Permanent Redirects differently than they did before.

• Some are reporting the presence of a time stamp below the snippet just ahead of the cache link that has been adjusting each hour.

• There are people writing comments about Google Caffeine search results looking like "allinanchor” search results.

• Now there tend to be signs that particular filters as well as “penalties”, as many would call it, have not been used in Google Caffeine.

• There were preliminary reviews that the Google Caffeine image search results were not really that superb at all. It seems that Google Caffeine is currently making use of the complete, actual image search results, while some say they are just the same.

• Google Caffeine appears to appreciate very good website structure and/or instant loading websites for top rated results. Well, a lot think that this has always been the case with Google so not much of a change.

• The fresh Google Caffeine search results URLs tend to be not the same anymore. As a result, third party analytic software programs might become affected. For instance, the search results pages are now using # in the URL.

So these findings and initial results found by some Caffeine users are still yet to be confirmed, since there are some examples that others tend to contradict. There are still a lot of mysteries and surprises to be found on our Google Caffeine search results. Also with those feedbacks in mind we can say many are starting to outline new SEO techniques that might be of use to this new indexing system from Google.

Watch out for more updates on the list and perhaps some new SEO suggestions for your Internet Marketing Education...