Google’s Caffeine: I’ll take a large please.
Wayne Helman on August 12, 2009
1 Comment
On Monday of this week, Google announced a major effort to revamp parts of its core search engine, code named “Caffeine“. While the algorithms Google uses for search are notoriously reworked almost daily, Google has not released a major upgrade to the core engine in a few years.
Optically it seems as if this is in response to the Microsoft / Yahoo! joint effort to replace Google with Bing as the go-to search engine of choice. However, that relationship has some serious hurdles to overcome – namely the different philosophical views of the partners involved. Both have a long history of not only being archenemies, but also viewing interactive strategy from opposing ends of the spectrum.
Rumor has it that Microsoft being a “software” company is looking to add an “internet” company’s wisdom to their arsenal. But if history serves as any indication, Microsoft doesn’t listen to anyone very well and has a habit of moving forward in their chosen direction until they loose the battle and realize their mistakes.
So the conceptual different between Yahoo! and Microsoft will most probably prove to be the largest hurdle to overcome is success for Bing if in the making.
Google on the other hand already is an innovator in the field and this latest effort in improving their search engine is most definitely not in response to the increasing competition, but rather an organic evolution of their core service. They are fully aware that search is still their foundation.
The upgrades to the core are expected to increase speed and alter the way results are ordered. Since the service is only just in Beta, time will tell how effective the upgrade is. Regardless, it’s welcome news to see Google trying to improve one of the worlds most frequently used tools period. I’m sure if speed is improved, it will have an impact on productivity around the globe.
October 30th, 2009 @ 9:18 AM
I personally think Google and all other search engines are far from being efficient. Ancient I would say (with the near future’s criteria).
They don’t just need an upgrade, they need radical changes, research and innovation.
The results should be as precise as possible to what the user wants. The interface (which is totally useless today) should be made sophisticated enough to provide the engine precisely with what the user is searching for and the results should also be as precise as possible.
You can find out how efficient a search engine is today by dividing the really useful results with the massive amount of results you’re getting.Then if you also consider how fast you can mine these useful results from the hundreds of thousands, you get the picture…