Google Caffeine Shakes Things up

In light of the Yahoo-Microsoft deal, Google seems to be at the right place at the right time once again in terms of innovation and keeping up with its competitors. For the last several months, a large team at Google has been working on a secret project nicknamed ‘Caffeine’. Caffeine is a new architecture for Google’s web search. This new architecture is said to include crawling, indexing, and ranking changes. Search Engine Land writes that, “we can guess that this new infrastructure may include ways of crawling the web more comprehensively, determining reputation and authority … and returning more relevant results more quickly”.

Google is asking users, specifically developers to test out Caffeine and give feedback. Google states that they, “only want feedback on the differences between Google’s current search results and [their] new system”. Google is also asking for higher-level feedback. How will Google Caffeine affect SEO? Marcel Media’s account coordinator, Brent Ludtke, notes that “it is far too early to make predictions about this engine, especially considering it’s the launch of the beta. The current results can greatly differ once it launches”.

How else might Caffeine affect SEO, Google, and its competitors?