Solid Thinking

What is Google Caffeine Update and how it may impact your online business?

This is from my blog about Google Caffeine Update on First Rate NZ website. Read the complete article on http://www.firstrate.co.nz/blog/the-caffeine-google-search-algorithm-update/

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A few weeks ago I arrived at my desk in the morning, when a colleague said “Have you heard of the Caffeine update?” – Jolly, I thought sarcastically, they finally fixed the coffee machine. I quickly enquired to hear more about Google’s latest algorithm update and have been on a quest to research Caffeine ever since!

What is Caffeine?

Google’s upcoming Caffeine update is said to be a rewrite of “the foundation of some of Google’s infrastructure” [Matt Cutts, Google - August 2009]. It simply means that Google search performs more efficiently: “better” and “faster”.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. (Source: googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com)

So is this an engine tweak to make Google faster and presumably free it up to do more things..? In any case, this opens up new possibilities for Google to really understand a website’s content and improve ranking relevance, perhaps including more semantic analysis, more link quality assessments, etc.

What Difference Does Caffeine Make?

To see how Google Caffeine differs from the current search, I tested it against some scenarios based on common search intentions:

• Looking for “how to” information (e.g., “how to get pregnant”, “how to make a website”, “how to use photoshop”)
• Looking for something specific, for example a name (e.g., “matt cutts”, “steve ballmer”, “britney spears”, “metallica lyrics”)
• Looking to buy a product (e.g., “buy hdtv”, “cheap flight”, “cheap hotels”, “book a hotel”)

I used the US-based index of the Sandbox – Google’s test environment that is live to the web – and here is what I found:

• For “how to” and names the top 3 – 4 results are mostly unchanged.
• For looking to buy something the top results are mostly different.
• In all 3 scenarios the results beyond #4 are largely unsettled with rank swaps, rank drops and newcomers.
• More specifically, results from eHow and Amazon seems to have been somewhat degraded by Caffeine. Good news unless you work for Amazon.
• Caffeine seems to recognise the focus phrase better (e.g., putting more emphasis on “cheap” for “cheap flights”).
• Clustered duplicate keyphrases (i.e., duplicate keyphrases in close proximity) seem to receive some sort of penalty, resulting in rank drops and/or degradation.

Read the complete article on http://www.firstrate.co.nz/blog/the-caffeine-google-search-algorithm-update/