The competition to becoming the biggest and most powerful search engine has just been intensified by Google, after they have revealed project ‘Caffeine’, a venture they have been working on for several months in an attempt to push the envelope for speed and relevance of search results.

Microsoft’s BING and Yahoo! have been enjoying much of the lime light recently after the announcement that Microsoft would be taking ownership of Yahoo’s search activities for the next 10 years. However, the launch of Caffeine should see Google return to first place in this exhilarating search engine contest.

The appearance of Google Caffeine looks no different from Google at present; it is the new technology behind the search engine that serves as the differentiating factor between old and new. Google engineers are encouraging web developers to test the new search engine here: www2.sandbox.google.com and provide feedback.

It aims to speed up the index of search results, create a larger index and improve accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. Essentially, newly published online content will appear in Google search results quicker than ever before.

Google are increasingly trying to lift the bar with the services they provide to their customers, continually trying to improve the ‘Google experience’. Real time search results are certainly a buzz topic at the moment, and it was only a matter of time before Google joined in the fun.

Matt Cutts has posted entries on his personal blog and Google’s webmaster central blog detailing more information about the update:

“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. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

Cutts disregarded comments that this project was a response to what Miscrosoft and Yahoo! have been doing recently:

“I love competition in search and want lots of it, but this change has been in the works for months. I think the best way for Google to do well in search is to continue what we’ve done for the last decade or so: focus relentlessly on pushing our search quality forward. Nobody cares more about search than Google, and I don’t think we’ll ever stop trying to improve.”

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