You’ve probably been reading a lot of press about Google Caffeine, the next-generation search infrastructure Google released to developer sandbox Aug. 10. Why not hear about it from the source?
Google’s Matt Cutts compares Caffeine to the company’s 2006 Big Daddy upgrade in this interview with WebProNews.
“It’s essentially rearchitecting, or rewriting, a large chunk of how we index Web pages,” Cutts said. “We’ve engineered it so regular users shouldn’t notice much of a difference. Power users might notice a difference, and that’s why we opened up a power-user preview.”
Cutts also says Caffeine is not a measured reaction to Microsoft Bing, and that summer is a great time to test.
OK, but there’s no question Google is under pressure to publicize search engine upgrades with so much press around Bing, upgrades to Facebook’s search service and the unending conversations about Twitter and real-time search.
In fact, Cutts addresses real-time search around the 4:50 mark here:
Now back to your regularly scheduled Google Watching. So, on the real-time search question, Cutts says it will help index documents faster but stops short of saying “Caffeine will enable Google to index Twitter tweets.”
But I don’t think it’s a stretch to conclude this is where Google is heading. Whether it comes with or before Caffeine is another question.
He answers the question about semantic search similarly, but we’ve known for a while Google has been introducing semantic search into the current iteration.
I’ve tested Caffeine versus current Google search, but you can also check out a side-by-side comparison of current Google search vs. Caffeine here in this site from Google image search provider FaceSaerch.