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Google is trying out a revolutionary search architecture in an attempt to improve their search service’s speed, increase the accuracy of their results and make them more comprehensive.

This new architecture (code named Google Caffeine) was announced on Monday on the company’s blog, when principal engineer Matt Cutts called on developers to assist in testing it and to feet comments back to the team.

Google Caffeine is currently available as a web-developer preview at www2.sandbox.google.com and is open to anyone that wishes to try it.

Matt Cutts & Sitaram Iyer wrote on the company’s blog that "For the last several months, a large team of ‘Googlers’ has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search." They continued in saying that Google Caffeine was intended to boost the search engine's index size, indexing speed and accuracy and that as the new architecture does not affect the current user interface, most users will not notice any difference from standard search provided by Google.

On initial inspection, the results provided by Google Caffeine look similar to the ones provided by the standard service, but after further examination it becomes clear that many pages are positioned higher or lower than in the standard service.

Some of the major changes that are visible include:
• Listings for Wikipedia seem to have increased in position in searches for most terms.
• In cases of double listings the first and second results occasionally swap, and in other cases the second link changes to another relevant page.
• Image results are no longer displayed when they occur in normal results.

The press release by Google suggests that the speed and efficiency of pages may be a factor in these changes; therefore encouraging sites to improve their efficiency (not necessarily size) would be an evident way to assist Google in crawling websites more easily.

Matt Cutts closed by stating that the development of Google Caffeine had nothing to do with the recent dealings between Microsoft and Yahoo, and that the best way for Google to continue in succeeding in the search engine world is to carry on with what they’ve been doing for the past decade and focus relentlessly on improving the quality of their search services.

Thomas Cole Solutions have spent time researching into this new Google architecture, and are preparing new SEO techniques ready for when it goes live. If you have any queries about this latest development don't hesitate to get in touch, you can drop us a message via the Contact Us Page or call the Techteam on 01254 832815.