Search Marketing Blog
Google Caffeine: What Is All The Buzz About?
Posted by Scott Fish on 09.25.2009
As most search marketing professionals are aware, the ultimate goal at Google is to provide users with the most relevant search results possible. To that end, the dominate search engine announced, in August 2009, a completely new algorithm (under the code-name ‘Caffeine’) that is designed to enhance the relevancy of their Natural search results.
We, at EngineWorks, have been testing this new algorithm over the last few months in order to understand how it will affect the positioning of pages within their organic index, and how it will impact the online search landscape.
Through our research, we have discovered that there are significant changes that have occurred behind the scenes at Google, including the following enhancements that Caffeine brings to their indexing performance.
Speed: Caffeine returns results twice as fast as the previous iteration of their algorithm. This enhancement is really only noticeable due to the fact that Google displays the speed at the bottom of each search page. In actuality, we’re only talking about a quarter-of-a-second for our tested results (0.25 seconds vs. 0.12 seconds). This means that Google’s new algorithm can identify what you’re looking for, query their database, and return relevant results for you twice as fast as you are used to.
Accuracy: This is the bread-and-butter of Google’s business model – accuracy matters! Their new algorithm attempts to determine what type of blended search results fit each search query more precisely than their previous algorithm. At first glance, you won’t notice that much of a difference, unless you take note of the inclusion of image, video, news and blog posts in their search results. At the time of our analysis, overall accuracy appears to be improved for some results, and is not yet noticeable for others.
Temporal Relevance: This is a hot topic in the search industry right now. Think about it… when an important news story breaks, who will have the fastest and most relevant news results? Is it Twitter with their legions of mobile phone users? How about Wikipedia, with their army of independent editors? What about CNN, and their global network of professional journalists? Or, will it be Google, with their impressive ability to catch the slightest uptick in attention being given to a specific story, and then aggregate the best sources in their search results? Google is battling, right now, with other “real-time” aggregators such as Twitter and Facebook. However, the search behemoth is also competing against the other major engines, including Microsoft’s new “Decision Engine” – Bing. We tested news keyword searches, and found little to no improvement in temporal relevance compared to their previous algorithm. This is an area that Google will have to improve in order to maintain its dominant position within the search landscape.
Index Size: Google takes a great deal of pride in being able to crawl, and discover, new content quickly. The overall size of Google’s index is unknown (they stopped boasting in 2005). However, individual keyword search result numbers are starting to get smaller. This is a good thing! Google is weeding-out the junk (e.g., duplicate content and irrelevant results), and providing sets of listings that are higher quality to the searcher. For example, when we conducted a search for “satellite radio” in their old algorithm, we received more than 39 million result pages; whereas Caffeine displayed only 19.8 million pages for the same query. In many cases, Google is reducing the number of results returned for a specific keyword by 30-50%.
What does this mean for you as a searcher?
Your search experience on Google is improving. Google is faster (in terms of milliseconds), and more accurate.
What does this mean for you as a business?
Your on-page site content needs to be fresh, relevant, and useful to the greatest number of individuals searching for keywords related to your brands, products, and services. You no longer will be able to copy a news story and call it “new content”. This means that it is paramount to think outside-the-box when creating new site content. And not just in terms of text…but, also video and images!
Try Caffeine for yourself
Grab your favorite stimulating beverage, and get Caffeinated!
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