What’s New in Google Caffeine Search

No matter what Bing may come and ago, we still love google for it’s higher relevance and accuracy rather than fancy stuff Microsoft is putting into their pathetic-decision engine. Yesterday, without explaining what’s new, Google opened the floodgates on what it’s describing as the next generation of its search engine, most likely to test its efficiency and performance using real-world traffic.

Testers have been invited to sample the new engine that Google calls “Caffeine,”.

We believe Google intentionally isn’t yet explaining just what the differences are.

But in order to findout the mystery, We did alot of intial testing, surprisingly, observed non-fancy differences comparing Caffeine to Google’s current Production release.

Here is what we noticed –

1. For most simple search query we tried, the top three non-paid search results were always the same. But the order of results starting as high as #4, sometimes #6, changed. Usually Caffeine retrieved the same pages as the stable version, but shuffled them in a different order.

Caffeine also included a separate grouping of entries taken from Google Groups (posts on Usenet forums), which Stable omitted. Caffeine then rated the text of a discussion forum on the subject much higher — #7 rather than #10.

2. News – For both engines, the retrieved Google News entries at the top were identical — evidently Caffeine’s new algorithms do not extend to Google News (or to any other Google department). And again, the top three entries retrieved by Caffeine and Stable were identical. While the remainder of Caffeine’s Page 1 entries included a YouTube video that didn’t appear on Stable’s Page 1.

3. Accuracy in Search results

No doubt, I was always satisfied with the releavance of the results. But in the new Caffeine it’s more accurate. A simple search on “obama jokes” yields different results on both. Caffeine being more accurate than the stable.

4. Search Auto-Complete

Search keyword assistance as-you-type has improved. When I type “obama” I’m given option for 2nd keyword in bold by popularity of searches related to that word.  It no longer displays no. of results like it did in stable.

5. Related Searches:

This has gone for good from top and exists only at bottom.

6. Realtime:

It looked more realtime than the stable version. The fact that when an event occurs, related news become available on caffeine.

7. No. of Results

More more more. Already Google had the largest no. of indexed pages. And now it shows even more no. of search results per search.

A Typical search “typhoon” yielded 15,300,000 on caffeine and 12,500,000 on stable.

What does this mean? Google now considers a wider bucket before determining the most relevant results. The results in future will be more accurate.

8. More Social Networking Friendly

Now we get more search results from social networking sites like Twitter.

9. Less Spam

Google has taken Spam very seriously. Searching for free stuff on internet mostly yielded spam sites. On caffeine, it’s much more cleaner.

9. It’s faster

It’s not just more Realtime, but also faster per search query. A typical search query which takes 0.2 -0.4 milliseconds on stable version is now only < 0.2 milliseconds at all times, mostly 0.05 to 0.18 ms.

So now Google is prepared for more search traffic than ever thereby reducing load of per-search-per-server.

Verdict

After our initial tests of Google’s experimental Caffeine search engine versus its existing stable one, we’re clear on  what the differences could mean – A More scalable, Faster, Realtime, Safer Google.

It could be that Google is manipulating our patience and actually not implementing anything new just because they think it’s perfect. We can’t really say anything at this point. But our analysis is a proof that change is coming, and there’s something hidden that Google wants to tell us — Google is still the Best.