The impact of Google Caffeine

Johannes Beus
It's been a while, since Google announced that they will start using a new search-infrastructure by the name of “Caffeine” as a base for many Google services, in the future. This new infrastructure is now in use and I worked up two evaluations to show the changes this has brought. The first diagram shows the percentage of keywords which have at least one “current result” within the first 10 results. Those are results for which Google also displays how long ago, in minutes, they found or refreshed the site:


You will notice that from December 2008 till December 2009, their quota was pretty steady, which changed majorly at about newyear. By now, about 20 to 35 percent of all searchresults have at least one “current result” on the first SERP. The second diagram shows a similar evaluation, though this time, it looks at the integration of the real-time-search. This is a box, which updates itself constantly with the most recent Twitter-messages and Facebook-statuschanges that pertain to the queried keyword. Seeing how Google only started to use this feature in 2010, we keep to that timeframe:


Even though they started out hesitant at first, they are using this feature more and more now. The waves in this diagram lead us to assume, that they use the troughs are being used to evaluate how well the users are reacting to the feature. It seems that the results are favorable, seeing how the box is being used more often and it seems that we will have to get used to it being there in the future. As the importance of this feature goes up, it's going to be interesting to see how Google will deal with the spam-problem – the amount and quality of ranking-signals is extremely limited with data so fresh.
Johannes Beus - on Tue (08/17/2010) at 22:21 PM

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