It’s been a week now since Google opened a web developer preview to collect feedback of their latest update – Caffeine. There’s not much to see when you first try out the sandbox. When asked about the update, Google’s Matt Cutts explained;

The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure. But some of the search results do change, so we wanted to open up a preview so that power searchers and web developers could give us feedback.

So what effect is this update going to have on Google’s SERP’s?

Well, I did a few tests to see if there are any significant changes, I chose to search for my favourite social media girly Julia Roy, as after doing a few test searches – her’s was the one that yielded the most noticeable differences.

Speed

Caffeine allows Google to index the web at a higher pace – gathering more information and doing it faster with most searches taking half the time compared to the current version.

As you can see, Google Caffeine returned 6,840,000 results in 0.08 seconds compared to the current Google, which returned 5,740,000 in 0.45 seconds.

Real Time Search

The number of pages being indexed could be due to Google’s interest in integrating real time search in this update. There is definitely more weight being given to social media profiles. This is apparent in the results below – juliaroy.com was 1st in the old Google, whereas in the Caffeine update it has been relegated to 6th in favour of some of her social media profiles.

What Else?

There are many more speculations as to what the update will mean for SEO – from 301 redirects being treated differently, to it favouring non hyphenated domains – but we will not know for sure until it goes live. I do however think one of the main issues facing Google is making sure that it’s results aren’t skewed in favour of real time social media content at the expense of non time-sensitive SERPs. We may want the most up to date information, but we still want it to be quality authoritative content.

You can find out more about the Caffeine update (as well as why Matt Cutts is suddenly bald!) in the video below.