Google.com: New Caffeine Search
Although you may not notice a radical difference, Google is changing the way it ranks search results. Google search results are based on a complex algorithm. Factors, such as, the domain name, the age of the domain name, type of webpage, links out and links in are calculated into a formula. The result gives the content its page rank.
Though Google is not making public the details of the algorithm, some changes are obvious. A much heavier weighting is being given to “real time” searches which connect sites like Blogs, Twitter and FaceBook directly to Google.
Matt Cutts of Google said: The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI (user interface) 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.
When Caffeine was introduced, so was a sandbox, where people could play around with Caffeine based search results, and get a look at how rankings were altered (if at all), and try to get a feel for how it was going to go. Now that sandbox has closed up shop, it looks like the Caffeine update will be live in Google search before too long.
Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center.