Google Gets Faster, Less Spammy With Revamped Search Engine
Google has released a test version of its main search engine that the company claims is faster and more accurate than its current search page.
Unlike some previous experiments and changes that tweaked the user interface for Google Search, this release is focused on the backend, with changes that are designed to improve results. According to a post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog, the charges are part of a larger effort to “push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”
With Microsoft riding a new wave of popularity in the search world, thanks to the popularity of its new Bing search engine and the company’s coming collaboration with Yahoo, Google is clearly feeling some pressure to improve its own search offerings. Not to mention the growing focus on real-time search, fueled by the popularity of Twitter and Facebook, both of whom recently rolled out new search features emphasizing the visibility and accuracy of real-time results on their services — Facebook on Monday and Twitter last month.
You can play with a sandboxed version of the new search engine — dubbed “caffeine” — at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ (there’s also a Firefox search plugin available). The results, while similar, are also clearly different, and, in our testing, considerably improved over the current incarnation of Google Search.
For example, a search for “Webmonkey” yields a slightly different set of results, with our Twitter account one spot higher and several more suspicious, spam-like sites gone altogether.
Indeed, killing spam results seems to be one of the strong points of the new search infrastructure, with some searches — like for example, “search engine optimization” — offering quite different and, in some cases, far fewer results.
Of course the new, presumably smarter, backend means that it could be time to rewrite the SEO rules slightly. Thus far Google hasn’t altered its suggestions for web developers who want to optimize their search, but clearly the differences between new and old will mean some tweaks in way you optimize your sites.
But it’s still a bit early to start worrying about. For now, Caffeine is still very experimental and, according to the Google’s blog post, incomplete.
Google is currently looking for feedback from web developers. There’s a “Dissatisfied? Help us improve” link at the bottom of the new page which allows you to send the engineering team your thoughts on the differences between the new and old infrastructure (be sure to use the word Caffeine somewhere in the body of your message).
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