The next generation of search engines has been announced by Google.  Late Monday night, Google staff software engineer, Sitaram Lyer and Google principal engineer, Matt Cutts made a blog post letting the world know about Google Caffeine.

Caffeine has been under development for months and its announcement came just weeks after the partnership of Microsoft and Yahoo.  You can give it a test run yourself at http://www2.sandbox.google.com. 
Google is not sharing exactly what they have changed but they are saying that the new engine will be faster, more accurate, and return better results. 

We have tested it ourselves and the first two things we noticed when we tested Caffeine is the speed and the amount of results returned.  It is about twice as fast as the current version of the search engine.  We ran a search in both engines for the phrase web design.  In caffeine it loaded in .15 seconds and in the current version in .26 seconds.  There were 218 million occurrences in Caffeine and 327 million in the current form.  We then tested several other words and the speed of caffeine was always faster, but the amount of occurrences did vary.

Other noticeable changes are the search results are slightly different.  Upon further testing it also appears that real time searches play a more important role in Caffeine.  This could be a step to compete with the real time searches of Twitter and Facebook.

What does this new search engine mean for your website and its search engine optimization?  We believe that this means that Google Caffeine is going to put a greater emphasis on keyword phrasing to ensure more relevant and accurate returns.  We also believe that load time of your Web pages is going to be an important factor.

If you have any questions about Google Caffeine or how to be sure that your Web site is optimized for the search engines feel free to contact us today.