August 12, 2009 by Andy Russell
Yesterday Google announce that they had been working on a ‘secret project’ that they describe as ‘The first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.’ Let’s leave the ‘other dimensions’ side of things alone for now – though the mind boggles – and focus on the here and now. As it stands Google have released a sandbox version of the latest update to their web search. It’s called Caffeine.
There are no noticeable differences to the look or the structure contained within Caffeine, and even Google admits that ‘most users won’t notice a difference in search results,’ though there are a couple of noteworthy alterations which include, as far as we can tell, new methods of crawling and of determining authority and reputation (that possibly go beyond inbound links and Page Rank).
So not quite earth shattering news, but definitely noteworthy. Actually, the fact that they’ve released a sandbox at all is noteworthy – Google are not usually ones for user consultation when it comes to their search algorithm, but that’s another post for another time I suppose.
Related posts:
