|
27 January 2010
Posted in
S.E.O
Google has been planning to launch a new updated version of their search engine, codenamed caffeine. The new search tool is meant to increase speed, accuracy, temporal relevance and volume of the search results. After some extensive research I have found that people have been testing the new Google caffeine developer’s beta release compared to its older version, and I’m going to show you what everyone found…
Some people have been comparing it to Bing as well. Except for the speed it pulls results, as Bing doesn’t show this information. Now the first and most thought about factor is the speed. Everyone knows even a hundredth of a second is a good improvement for any search engine and does well for the business. The new Google search is faster, but just how much faster is it? Well the old search used to take 0.25 sec.’s to collate 51,900,000 results for the search term, ‘dog’. The new version, Caffeine, takes the amazing cut in half time of 0.12 seconds with 359,000,000 results. Damn, that’s where the name Caffeine comes from. They have halved the time for a search, which is very surprising seeing as they were already very fast. Even when searching multiple word search terms, it's still so much faster than the old Google search.
Accuracy was harder to judge, when looking at results for people (as long as they have a pretty unique name) they both show accurate results, but the new version shows more of what we are looking for, mainly more interesting information. When searching for a particular article or something that requires a particular string of words or a quote, the new version of the search engine focused more on the whole string of words rather than each individual word, which is much more accurate than the old Google search which focuses mainly on separate keywords when this is done. And Bing was literally all over the place with its results, it was less accurate than old Google. So far that’s 2 to Google Caffeine and none for Bing or old Google search.
Temporal relevancy is the term we are using to describe the ability to get better, more breaking news from the searches. Now searching for FreindFeed, the results were more or less the same across search engines. When searching on the china landslide (this was back when it happened, on the beta release of the new Caffeine search), the new Caffeine search showed the newest results with updated body counts on the first page, unlike the old search and a bit newer than Bing’s results, this means it's better at getting the updated/ newer news first. When searching ‘hall of fame game’ the results were also better on Google Caffeine. Even after saying these things in their own reviews, some people said it was a draw on this one, which prompts the question, do you even know what you’ve just wrote? Well I think we can clearly see the Google Caffeine search was better, even if only very slightly, still undeniably slightly better, so it's another win for Google Caffeine, not a draw!
The last thing left to cover is the volume of results. We shall do this by searching for 3 different terms, one single word term, one two word term and a several word term. Lets use, say, ‘Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland Trailer’ is a term that a lot of people are using for a search term in this test. We got 1,912,000 on Bing, 1,650,000 on Google caffeine and 1,230,000 on the old Google. Then I decided to search my name, without my middle name, for the two word term, ‘James Howe’. Again the results were Bing with the highest volume of results, Google Caffeine coming second and Google’s original search coming in last. Finally we searched dog, and got 230 million results from Bing, 350 million results with Google Caffeine and 59.1 million for the old Google search, which doesn’t quite seem right that must have been an error on the old Google, but Google Caffeine actually had more results than Bing on the one word term. I think that may be due to Google becoming more relevant and accurate on more than one word searches.
So that’s one point to Bing vs. three points for Google Caffeine vs. no points for the old Google search. That gives a clear overall winner as Google Caffeine. Is Bing ever going to get the speed, quality of results, love of the people that Google has? I think not. Well Google is now better, faster and more accurate, which is good news, but the algorithms have been completely reworked, so be careful SEO executives, you need to learn this one fast.
