Google Caffeine 2010 Updates

Google is getting serious about realtime search, adding Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace streams into results and adding a recent “updates” option which is addictive. But behind the scenes Google is also getting ready to push out an entirely new way for indexing the Web. Codenamed “Caffeine,” Google has been testing it since last summer in one datacenter, and is now getting ready to push it out across all of Google.

Some SEO-minded tipsters say that they are starting to notice faster search response times, but Google is sticking to the party line that Caffeine won’t roll out until after the New Year of 2010. Read also how Google Caffeine upset local search rankings.

An independent study conducted in September by SEO firm Summit Media suggests that for generic search terms, Caffeine gives more weight to news and social media results, while more specific keywords are more likely to turn up websites about that topic. The Summit Media study compared Caffeine against Google’s current index for about 10,000 keywords. Summit’s findings include:

* Rankings are unlikely to fluctuate. Taken across all of the keywords for a client there should be a tiny percentage change in ranking.

* Websites that do lose rankings are likely to be relying on older, archived content that’s not been updated in years. Keeping your site fresh to be crawled by Caffeine will be important.

* There have been no changes to give one sector any new advantage over another.

* Generic terms against long tail terms in Caffeine show a greater priority for News, Information and Social Media – which fits with generic terms being less clear in terms of the searcher’s intent.

* Only 5% of urls contain exact matches for the searched keyword, 6% of the total point score is made up by exact match urls.

Will there be any change in Google ranking algorithm

There will be a change in the ranking algorithm. Page load speed will be a serious criteria in ranking issue. Faster search responses and faster pages are expected to be key issue in the caffeine’s search algorithm. And this will mean sites using cheap hosting, Flash modules etc are going to lose some altitude in their rankings.

Search, but You May Not Find

AS we become increasingly dependent on Google, we need to be increasingly concerned about how it is regulated. Without search neutrality rules to constrain Google’s competitive advantage, we may be heading toward a bleakly uniform world of Google Everything — Google Travel, Google Finance, Google Insurance, Google Real Estate, Google Telecoms and, of course, Google Books.

Some will argue that Google is itself so innovative that we needn’t worry. But the company isn’t as innovative as it is regularly given credit for. Google Maps, Google Earth, Google Groups, Google Docs, Google Analytics, Android and many other Google products are all based on technology that Google has acquired rather than invented.

Recommended reading:
* Expose your business with Google Places