Google's "Caffeine" vs. Microsoft's Bing
The company is seeking help testing a new-and-improved search system, codenamed “Caffeine”
Just a couple of months after Microsoft launched Bing, Google announced it is tweaking its own search infrastructure. Google officials said that the company is seeking help testing a new-and-improved search system, codenamed “Caffeine” — complete with changes to its indexing, ranking and crawling mechanisms.
Silicon Alley Insider speculates that Caffeine could be the “secret project” to which the New York Post was referring back in June when it reported that Google cofounder Sergey Brin was assembling a crack team of Google search experts to tweak Google’s engine in response to Bing.
Bing, the revamped Live Search, included a number of user-interface changes, as well as tweaks to the underlying Microsoft search algorithm. The Caffeine test site — which anyone can try themselves starting August 10 — doesn’t offer any kind of noticeable UI tweaks. It does, however, change the way results are ranked.
Search Engine Land did a side-by-side comparison of a search for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” using the old and new Google engines. They found the new Google infrastructure returned video and news results midway down the page. The current Google search system, however, returned news at the top, video in the middle, and images at the bottom of the page, Search Engine Land found.
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