Google Jolts Search Engine With Caffeine

What does Google have that Bing doesn't? Caffeine. The search engine giant Tuesday released a beta version of "Caffeine," a next-generation architecture for Google's Web search.

Google engineers unveiled the news in a blog and said that they have been working on this "secret project" over the past few months. Caffeine is the first step in a process that will let the company "push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions," wrote Sitaram Iyer, staff software engineer, and Matt Cutts, principal engineer.

The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. The changes may be more apparent to Web developers and power searchers, so Google is opening up a Web developer preview to get their feedback.

Some parts of this system aren't completely finished yet, the engineers said, but it is expected that Caffeine will replace Google's current search engine.

Although Caffeine was just launched, feedback has been positive.

"Wow, the index is way more pertinent, less spam, more good Web site," wrote one reviewer. "I'm tracking a lot of searches and see huge improvement in the quality of the results. I hope it goes live like this."

Another tester liked the fact that Caffeine also provides more results from social networking sites.

"I've noticed more Twitter pages in the results with this version of Google. Quite like having that - makes it easier to find people and companies."

It remains to be seen how Caffeine will stack up against Microsoft's Bing search engine. While Bing generated more traffic than Microsoft's previous search engine, it was largely due to curiosity. While Google still rules the search engine landscape, the recent Microsoft-Yahoo tie-up could eventually give Google a run for its money.

Want to see how the search engines stack up against each other? You can, thanks to the launch of a new Web site, Bing vs. Google, (current version), which offers a side-by-side comparison of query returns from both search engines.

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