Google unveiling faster search, named 'Caffeine'

BANGALORE, INDIA: Amidst the growing competition in the search market, Google Inc is coming out with a new search engine code-named 'caffeine'. The company claims that it will be faster and more relevant than others. Google has already unveiled a test version of the search engine for users to look at the results it will generate.

An official Google blog says that some parts of the search engine aren't completely finished yet. A preview of Google's new infrastructure is accessible at http://www2.sandbox.google.com. Google engineers have invited web developers to test the new search engine, and give their feedback.

Look-wise, the new engine doesn't appear different, but its developers hope that the technology they have used will make a difference in terms of speed and relevance.

The blog says, “The new infrastructure sits under the hood of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Matt Cutts, a principal engineer at Google, and Sitaram Iyer, a staff software engineer, have posted an entry on the company's webmaster central blog, appealing to developers to try the newly improved service and send them some feedback.

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions,” says the blog.

The public testing of the new engine comes two weeks after Microsoft Corp. struck a deal to replace Yahoo Inc.'s search engine, with its search engine Bing. Yahoo Search and Bing are the second and third most popular engines after Google.

However, in a personal blog post, Cutts said that Caffeine was not specifically a response to Bing, "I think the best way for Google to do well in search is to continue what we’ve done for the last decade or so: focus relentlessly on pushing our search quality forward. Nobody cares more about search than Google, and I don’t think we’ll ever stop trying to improve," media reports quoted him as saying in his blog.