Hot on the heels of the recent Google Vince update, and problems we have been seeing with foreign websites listed prominently in Google UK, Google has announced a new impending update, referred to as Caffeine. This is seen in a lot of quarters as a response to criticism of Googles handling of indexing the “real time” web, where Twitter and Facebook (particularly with the recent acquisition of FriendFeed) are seen to be ahead of Google.
Google’s caffeine update sounds like in essence it will be pretty similar to the normal users of the engine, but the underlying technology that is powering this update, is a cleaner re-written version of what they already have, and they are probably looking to make the best use of the server resources amongst other things.
If you want to try out the new version, its available at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/, where you can trial some test searches. Google are actively seeking user feedback from this, so if you have comments and queries, make sure to click the link at the bottom of the page “Dissatisfied? Help us improve.” and include the word caffeine in your comments.
Although this is currently the .com version of the search engine rather than .co.uk, with a little bit of tweaking by manually adding “&hl=en&gl=uk” into the address bar at the top of the screen, you should be able to see UK oriented results.
There are lots of people out there at the moment that are testing what differences this will make compared to the current version, the best of which I found at Mashable, which also compared it to the new Microsoft search engine Bing. It seems like the speed improvements are a big factor in why they are doing this, as it seems to be twice as quick at returning results as the “old” Google that we are all currently using.
Having also read an article about this on the BBC, it seems that this is getting a lot of mainstream publicity at the moment, and the questions about the implications of this update have already started rolling in from my clients.
It remains to be seen how soon this update to the engine will launch, but we will be keeping our eyes peeled, and watching closely to see the impact that this has on all our clients.
Hopefully, as a result of this update when it goes live, it will clear out a lot of the irrelevant foreign search results which are currently cluttering up the Google UK listings in lots of areas.
Pete Handley
Campaign Delivery Manager
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