Infinite Path

Earlier this week, Google allowed web developers access to its new upgrade, which, when the testing process has been completed, will replace the current main search engine. The upgrade, which has been officially nicknamed “caffeine”, is set to make search results noticeably quicker and a higher degree of accuracy is also a major ambition of the company, which has apparently been working on the changes for several months now.

The official announcement from Google has been accompanied by a blog post from Matt Cutts, the search quality guru at the company. Contained within his post was a ready-made defense for those who will undoubtedly accuse the company of making a knee jerk reaction to increased competition and rivalry in the search industry.

Whilst such accusations seem naive, particularly since such large-scale changes to search architecture cannot be performed in a short space of time, the timing of the announcement may be a clever ploy on behalf of Google.

During recent months, the gaze of the world’s technology media has strayed away from Google to focus upon new names including Bing and Wolfram Alpha. Furthermore, the manner in which Twitter continues to grow in popularity along with its recent site face lift which seems to have prioritised real time search as a fundamental feature, has meant that Google, although still the centre of attention in a crowded online world, is facing a fight to dominate the headlines.

Facebook has also made several moves in the last few days which indicate that it is starting to pay more attention to the potential importance of real time search. Their acquisition of Friend Feed represents their desire to aggregate real time results which could provide relatively greater value to users since the results only provide information about friends and acquiantances. The irony of Friend Feed being founded by individuals intimately involved with Google has not been lost on some online commentators.

How exactly Google’s “caffeine” update will change the search landscape in the long-term remains to be seen and a more accurate estimation will be possible once the update has completed its test phase. However, it is thought that real time search results will be a key feature, although the manner in which Google can achieve real time status with any degree of accuracy is debatable since pages still need to be crawled. The immediacy of Twitter, and Friend Feed, will probably remain unrivaled, at least for the time being. However, it would be unwise to suggest that Google will be happy to sit still and not pursue this desire for news, now.