The search engine giant is slowly rolling out plans to revamp the engine that runs under the hood of its marquee product, Google.com.
Google is pouring considerable resources into this project, including a “large” team of programmers that intend to help the company “push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”
A beta version of the new Google is available online. A brief test of the new engine results in a similar experience to the current Google — and that's exactly what people should expect, Google said.
"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," company representatives said. "But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback."
One of those power searchers included tech analyst MG Siegler of TechCrunch.com.
"One thing I do notice is that across the board, Caffeine seems to have more results in its index than regular Google does," Siegler said. "But it’s hard to tell if that really matters since most people never get to the end of the millions of results for items — and for most, in fact, you can’t."
The company may command almost 70 percent of the search engine market, but with pressure coming from a high-profile merger between Yahoo Search and Microsoft’s upstart Bing search engine, is Google trying to stay ahead of the competition?
"Nope," said Google developer Matt Cutts, who's working on the Caffeine project. "I love competition in search and want lots of it, but this change has been in the works for months. 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."