Tive's Take

Google have launched pre-beta testing on Caffeine, an upgrade to their main product, search.  This is a clear step towards making the search behemoth the main player in real-time search. As our behaviour online continues to swing from content consumption to creation, and with new search competition gaining traction from Microsoft/Yahoo and real-time megaliths Facebook and Twitter in the fray, this is an overdue and entirely necessary upgrade. Rather than your search analysing old web indexes (some of which are up to two weeks old), those indexes are now refreshed continually so that search terms will give in different results from one day to another. If you are searching for Shakespeare’s Sonnets, you probably won’t see much change from one day to the next. But if your search involves anything more current or an evolving story such as the gulf oil disaster, you will see more recent results if they are relevant.

That’s the theory at least. The kind folk at Mashable have reviewed Caffeine on 4 terms, Speed, Accuracy, Temporal Relevancy and Index Size. Is it better? Kind of.

Google need to improve their current offering in terms of indexing more UGC sites that offer real-time information, however even if Caffeine doesn’t give it the boost it needs in light of Facebook and Twitter real-time search, I am not too concerned. If Google does not play the real-time game as well as these sites, these sites don’t even begin to challenge Google on non-real time search. Let’s hope that as beta testing continues, Google can tweak whatever smart algorithms they have in place to improve real-time results. Once they do, our lives will be a lot easier and I’ll be visiting search.twitter.com a lot less.