Google Caffeine – faster but at what price?
Published by on August 14th, 2009 Comments Off
Goole has released a test version of their new search index as a sandbox version. Designed to trial the new search, I suspect SEOs worldwide are scouring Caffeine attempting to work out how their sites will fare in the new SERPs. Hop over there and try some searches. You’ll likely see the result pretty close to normal, particularly for search terms that live outside news and rapidly moving subjects.
Rapid indexing of new and relevant content seems to be of increasing importance to Google and it is this that might provide the difference in search results.
Exactly how Caffeine will integrate most recently indexed content amongst the aged, authoritative content previously given prominence in Google SERPs remains to be seen. We are likely to see results shifting rather rapidly. Hot topics will float to the top of listings, but only temporarily, sinking almost as rapidly to blend with the more stable results. But that is pure speculation at this time.
Is it all about twitter-fear?
Earlier this year, twitter began aligning itself as the future of immediate search. Google got understandably nervous, and Caffeine might be the result. I doubt Google will replace the place twitter has become to so many of us as a place to get literally up to the minute news about important events.
Though still nowhere near as immediate as searching the contents of the twitter timeline, Caffeine does index and present relevant results much sooner than Google before it.
How does this affect SEO?
The jury remains out on how this enhances or inhibits direct SEO activity. We are certainly expecting to see more flexible and dynamic results for many searches as new, fresh content is intermixed with the authoritative.
There are still apparent glitches in the system right now, so no Caffeine search results can be trusted as representative at this time.
