No good can come from a company standing still, however far ahead of the competition it may be. Which is clearly the thinking at Google, which despite leading the search market is still trying to improve upon what it is currently offering its users. Google Search is about to get a Caffeine boost and is offering those self same users a chance to trial the new and improved indexing and ranking system.

Google is by far the dominant force in the Web search sector, enjoying a 70 percent market share ahead of rivals including Microsoft Bing, Yahoo, and a whole host of smaller more niche search engines. But competition is increasing, with the Microsoft/Yahoo deal meaning Bing is now a powerful rival to Google.

Consequently, Google has been beavering away behind the scenes in an effort to improve on its already very fast reliable search engine. The new technology, which offers a new way of indexing and ranking search results, is codenamed Caffeine and is clearly intended to give Google Search a shot in the arm.

You can test the new beta version of Google Search out by following this link. You’ll immediately notice that the user interface has not changed in the slightest. Instead, Caffeine is all behind the scenes improvements, reportedly increasing the speed that search results are returned and improving the order in which they are shown.

You’re unlikely to notice any real difference to the service unless you run a number of searches side-by-side on the new and old Google Search engines. Even then, the differences are likely to be slight, with the odd result moving up or down a place or two. Of course, the current iteration of Caffeine is a work in progress and is likely to be tinkered with prior to a full release.

This is a significant under the hood change to the Google Search algorithm that Google clearly feels needs testing before being rolled out. But after an hour of comparing search results I confess to hardly being able to tell the difference. I’m sure the full consequences for search optimization and how Web sites rank will be felt in time, but for now it seems as though this isn’t really anything to write home about.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 1:52 am under Google, Internet, Opinion, Technology.

Read more entries by Dave Parrack.
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