Google Caffeine Search Update

Google says Caffeine, the next version of its search engine, will soon be available to a wider audience, offering technology designed to deliver faster and more accurate results.

For those of us who missed the news; Google Caffeine is a next-generation search architecture for Google that’s supposed to be faster and more accurate, providing better, more relevant results and crawling larger parts of the web. Of course the biggest question for most of us is not how fast the new Google is but how high our websites will rank in the new index. Until now we were able to check our sites positions in Caffeine at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ but now it says:

Thank you!

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

So it’s official. Google Caffeine is going live and taking all the changes with it. If you’ve been monitoring your sites rankings in Google Caffeine you may expect your site to appear at same position in Google. Anyway don’t be surprised to see your sites rankings dance around a while – that’s Caffeine coming.

The company has provided no launch date, but the first sign of Caffeine’s impending appearance was a message on the Caffeine sandbox page, where developers and the public have been previewing the technology and leaving comments.

In the brief message posted at the sandbox address on Tuesday, Google said Caffeine would soon be available to the public. "We believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one datacentre," the message said.

Google said the sandbox was no longer needed and was now closed. "But we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given," Google said.

In August, Google revealed that a large team had been working on Caffeine, which it described as a secret project to produce the search giant’s next-generation architecture.

Caffeine looks unlikely to alter the familiar look of Google search, but will work in the background, improving the engine’s index size, indexing speed and accuracy. Unlike Google’s regular updates to its search technology, the new engine represents a significant change in part of the company’s search infrastructure.

"Caffeine update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure," Google principal engineer Matt Cutts wrote in August.