Google’s Caffeine, the developer sandbox for the company’s next-generation search infrastructure, is down until later this afternoon. The reason? Upgrades.
Search Engine Land’s Matt McGee spotted the news in a Twitter tweet from Google Caffeine engineer Matt Cutts, who links back to McGee’s brief:
Matt cutts caffeine down.png
A trip to the sandbox http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ Web page redirects us to this URL and message:
Caffeine unplugged.png
McGee left the floor open to jokes about decaffeination. I don’t have any, but my headline was going to be “Caffeine Grinds to a Halt.” It made me wince, so I abstained. Involuntary trite puns are are tough traps.
Speaking of which, has anyone referred to Cutts as a barista yet?
In the meantime, check out my eWEEK colleague Nick Kolakowski’s comparison of Caffeine to Microsoft’s Bing.
I know, I know; it isn’t fair to compare a sandbox build to a polished search engine, but don’t think that Cutts and Co. aren’t testing Caffeine against not only the current Google search iteration, but Bing, Yahoo and everything else out there.
Competition brings out the animal in corporate machines, even Google.