Google have announced that it is working on a new project (Cafeine) that will re-write the architecture for Googles web search. This is fundamentally a huge change (as big as Big Daddy); taken directly from the Google Webmasters blog for the three elements they believe make a great web search engine they need to:

  1. Crawl a large chunk of the web.
  2. Index the resulting pages and compute how reputable those pages are.
  3. Rank and return the most relevant pages for users’ queries as quickly as possible.

..and it is these three elements that the new Google infrastructure will address.

So will us mere mortals notice any difference?
Well according to Matt Cutts, no, we shouldn’t see any real difference between search results, and it will be a slow transition so that user feedback can be taken into consideration. But as he states as these changes are big it will be difficult to keep everything exactly the same.

This new change will give Google a more powerful base so that it can be flexible for real time indexing and possibly even semantic indexing so its laying the foundations for any changes that might happen in the future, although ulitmately its still to ensure Google feeds users with the best information it can.

Go and take a look you’ll find the new Google here – this is obviously just a preview so it will be interesting to see how this one pans out. We’d love to know your thoughts!