My Thoughts on Google Caffeine
Edit: When this post was written, Caffeine wasn’t live (for my datacenter area, at least). As of this morning (9/21/09) I noticed that I am seeing Caffeine’s results for all my searches.
I was recently asked what my thoughts were on the latest Google update, known as “Caffeine”. More than a simple algorithm update, it seems Caffeine is actually an upgrade to what powers Google’s search. It would be analogous to placing a newer, better engine inside a car.
You can try Google, powered by Caffeine at http://www2.sandbox.google.com.
When I brew a cup of Community Dark Roast to get my caffeine fix, the caffeine usually gets me going in the morning and speeds things up. I don’t know if that’s why Google picked their name, but searches do seem to be faster. (I tested a few searches between Caffeine and “regular” Google and found searches were often twice as fast. Of course, we’re talking times like 0.52 seconds vs 0.21 seconds. But still.)
The number of results found is unpredictable – sometimes “old” Google has more than Caffeine, sometimes less. Why? I would expect there’s a difference in indexing what is supposed to be more relevant to the query, and I suppose that’s why the reported number of the results in the index differs. This shouldn’t actually affect my search experience too much, since I usually don’t delve into the SERPS much more than page 2. But it shows that there’s a significant change in how things work behind the scenes.
Another difference I noticed was the snippet was different on many results. I like the new ones more. For instance, for the search “square foot gardening” I noticed a few of the results had a date preceding them, while the Caffeine version only contains the text I care about. However, this could be a negative – specifically in the case of blog posts: including the post’s date in the snippet could actually be helpful to a searcher. So I have a mixed opinion on this aspect of Caffeine.
I wanted to see how much better (or worse) Caffeine handled current news. So I picked a few events and headlines from Drudge Report and tried various searches. Sometimes Caffeine was better, sometimes it was about the same, and sometimes it was worse (showing older or less-relevant items). Overall, I don’t see enough of a difference to cite any real advantages or disadvantages between the two.
You wouldn’t believe how many random/weird/varied searches I attempted, just to see what Caffeine would spit out. One was “baptist church”. Both versions give Landover Baptist Church as one of the top results – and I don’t think that’s really the best result to serve someone performing that search (as much as I love the site and think it’s clever). Also (on that same search) “old” Google delivers some image and video results – while Caffeine does not. In my opinion, the video and image results are a good thing and add to the searcher’s experience.
With some other searches, I definitely saw the Caffeine results as being less-relevant and inferior in quality. But for the most part, this is a subjective judgment.
So, what do I think of Caffeine? My first impression is simply that it’s faster, but no more relevant. I’m sure we’ll have to wait until it’s officially put into use (assuming the engineers are still adjusting and tweaking it) before we can really see what it’s all about. But for now? I’m going to stick with searching via google.com, and will occasionally try Caffeine out of curiosity and to see if the results differ vastly when I’m concerned about the effect my SEO efforts may be having on a particular site.
If you want to easily compare the current incarnation of Google’s search engine with Caffeine, Compare Caffeine is your best bet