Google Caffeine Attempts to Beat Microsoft Bing and Focuses on Social Media

Google is about to introduce a new index search technology called "Caffeine." This "new and improved" search engine is more than just and upgrade on Google: it's a totally different search engine that relies on a completely new infrastructure (1). This new Google promises to be faster and more accurate than the old Google, to provide greater temporal relevancy (i.e., be focused on breaking news), and to provide a larger index size (i.e., display more results) (2).

The reason that Google has decided to launch Caffeine may be due to competition. Microsoft had recently brought out its new Bing search engine and had extended it to cover all of Yahoo's web features (3). The merging of Bing with Yahoo brought almost immediate payoff: the new Bing/Yahoo search engine had almost a 20% market share in searches last year, and that additional market share was coming at a cost to Google (4).

Even Facebook had joined the competition, joining forces with FriendFeed and launching a real-time search engine of its own.

Thus, Google launched its completely revamped search engine Caffeine. The Caffeine search engine takes up almost 100 million gigabytes of data, adding new information at a daily rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes (2, 3).

The new Google Caffeine is at least twice as fast as the old Google search engine when performing searches. Under the old Google, the engine would crawl the entire Web in order to update its index of pages. If updates were present in a batch of pages, they would not be made available until the entire batch had been updated. This could result in a loss of relevancy to user searches, since there was a delay between when an update was made and when Google located it and made it available.

With Caffeine, Google is able to crawl the Web in smaller portions, thus reporting updates on a more real-time basis.

According to Google, Caffeine will have improvements to size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness, and other dimensions (1). Site tests performed by private bloggers did indicate that Caffeine retrieves results twice as fast as the old Google (2). Meanwhile, Bing did not report a search time when input with the same search term. Caffeine is also much more accurate than Bing, bringing up search results that are weighed heavily for keywords and social media updates. In terms of temporal relevancy, both Caffeine and Bing brought up breaking news stories at about the same rate. And finally, in terms of index size, while Google Caffeine finds many more search results when compared to the old Google, Microsoft's Bing also finds a high number of search results.

Most testers agree that Google Caffeine will run on a real-time platform by taking into account keywords and social media platforms more so than the old Google ever did. When used to search for specific terms, Google Caffeine does bring up social media sites preferentially, especially if those sites have been recently updated. This can be of great benefit to bloggers and business owners who start using social media for posts and advertising, for example. It also means that social media is becoming more legitimate in terms of being a source of information.

Resources:

1. WOW: Google to Launch a New Version of Google Search http://mashable.com/2009/08/10/google-new-version/

2. Google Caffeine: A Detailed Test of the New Google http://mashable.com/2009/08/10/google-caffeine/

3. Google Adds Caffeine To Search http://www.informationweek.com/news/storage/data_protection/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=225600155&subSection=News

4. Bing Still Growing, Steals Market Share from Google http://mashable.com/2009/08/03/bing-market-share/

5. Watch Out Twitter! Facebook Launches Realtime Search http://mashable.com/2009/08/10/facebook-launches-realtime-search/

6. What Google's "Caffeine" Means for Business Owners http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2048729/what_googles_caffeine_means_for_business.html?cat=15