Google Caffeine is a major overhaul to Google’s search infrastructure that was announced in August of last year, which aims to deliver faster and more comprehensive crawling and indexing for the Google index.

About the Caffeine Roll-Out
After a developer preview period, Google rolled Caffeine out to just one of its data centers sometime around November 2009, giving a small percentage of users access to search results powered by Google’s fancy new infrastructure.   So when do the rest of us get to play!? In a recent Search Engine Land article, a Google spokesperson is quoted as expecting Caffeine “to roll out to all data centers over the coming months.”   This is a lot later than the estimate given by Google’s Matt Cutts, who blogged about Caffeine being rolled out after the 2009 holiday season. Bummer.

So Why’s Caffeine a Big Deal, Anyway?
Just to be clear, Caffeine is not a change to Google’s search algorithm, but a new approach to crawling and indexing web pages and content.   That said, it’ll almost certainly result in differences on search engine results pages (SERPs), because the new technology will allow Google to index more content (including more kinds of content) faster (think: realtime results).   What can we expect to see on Google SERPs powered by Caffeine?   Here’s a quick summary of speculations from around the web:

• The speed of search results will increase;
• The temporal relevance (i.e. real time) of results will increase;
• Social media will be more prominent/prevalent in search results;
• The variety of content offered on SERPs will continue to increase;
• The relevance/importance of long-tail keyphrase searches will increase (because of an even larger index).

Tags: caffeine, Google, search engine, search indexing