Web News

Google Caffeine to Launch in 2010

Plans for Google’s new indexing system, codenamed Caffeine, are well under way for an early 2010 launch. Testers claim that their Caffeine-powered searches are generating much faster response times than in the earlier stages of development.

Caffeine will be implemented internally, which means users will see no difference in the visuals and site design. Rather, they will experience faster searches, particularly in terms of loading photos, videos, and other heavy media.

The program will also shift priority from general web content to news and social media, and be more responsive to more keyword-heavy search terms. Website rankings will not change, but those that update more often will be given more priority on results pages.

One primary concern with Google Caffeine is that since the engine will focus on real-time results such as news, it may not be able to filter out fake news or observe the difference between credible and dubious sources.

According to various reports, Google had planned to use Caffeine on one of its data centers before going into testing, and results showed that the search engine rankings changed upon implementation.

Google officials say that Caffeine may go mainstream at the start of 2010, and that this does not necessarily mean that search engine listings will change once it’s in full swing. They added that until then, even non-Caffeine data centers will still be in top form.

Caffeine follows a series of revolutionary changes that Google has been rolling out in the past few months. The latest is a social search feature which allows users to combine results from friends’ social media accounts, such as Flickr, FriendFeed and Twitter.