Three Search Improvements with Google Caffeine

by Jeffrey Cohen | September 10, 2009 10:58 am

In case you haven’t heard, last month, Google announced a major algorithm change called Google Caffeine. And, for the first time ever, they have given us a sneak preview which, depending on who you believe, was either done to steal the thunder from MS Bing and other related news such as Facebook’s purchase of FriendFeed, get enough feedback to ensure similar results to the current algorithm or to truly get feedback from marketers and SEOs on their improvements.

In any case, this change is a new infrastructure that includes a rewrite of the underlying data storage technology – the Google File System (GFS). This will give Google more flexibility and speed in how they construct the search engine result pages (SERPs) in the future.

We are however seeing some differences in the sandbox results versus today’s results:

In this sandbox example below, we see 419,000 results being returned for candy apple gift baskets in 0.09 seconds with mrsprindables.com in the top spot.

Search Results from Google Caffeine

While in the following live example, we see 203,000 results being returned for the same search with amyscandykitchen.com getting the first position.

Search Results from Regular Google

I suspect there will be more to say on this as Caffeine rolls out and the SERPs are further enhanced but for now it seems to mean:

Size/Speed: Google is going to be crawling and indexing more pages faster to ensure the inclusion of fresh content in their results pages. They are also striving to return results to searches quicker.

Accuracy: They are working to make sure that the top results pages are going to be the ones with the content that most correctly match up with the searcher’s keyword.

Comprehensiveness: Those sites that are the authoritative resource on the intended destination content will become the top results.

We are taking all this to simply tell us that it is becoming more and more important for marketers to create sites with larger and larger collections of content in order to really dominate the natural listings on Goggle which will support the big brands over the long run.

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