Posted on 09.04.09

Search Engine Race Not Over…

by Stacy

So the beta of Google’s new search engine, Caffeine, is out and open to the public now since August 10, 2009, which makes it a perfect time to pick the brain of Mightybytes developer Amit about how it sizes up so far—tall, grande, latte-style—to Google’s current engine and Bing.com.

Google Caffeine (beta at http://www2.sandbox.google.com)
(Logo courtesy of http://www.googlefont.com/)
The new beta search engine is hitting hard on speeds and filtered search, nearly twice as fast as Google.com in our examples (yeah, search Mightybytes. We love visitors!) with results at:

• 0.13 seconds in Caffeine vs.
• 0.24 at Google.com.

The back-end search architecture has improved indexing and ranking changes. Getting better hits on more keywords, Caffeine displays slightly more results. In this case, 88,200 to 99,300 results. On Bing.com, we get a mere 6,050 results.

Amit also took a speed search test drive head-to-head between the two Google versions. “When I searched ‘PHP’ on Google.com, it shows, about 7,210,000,000 for php [definition]. (0.14 seconds)
whereas in Caffeine, it shows, about 7,990,000,000 for php [definition]. (0.16 seconds). But if you look closely, Caffeine has crawled roughly 780,000,000 more pages to get the lag of 0.02 seconds over its big counterpart. I would not mind such a lag but, as per the global user-base, I would definitely agree that users are not going to browse through the 7,000,000,000 pages. So, I would still wait on how many filtered results can both the engines show!”

Amit’s search for ‘Michael Jackson’ offers the results capacity and filtering strengths of Caffeine also:

On Google.com
News at the top, Images then Videos in the middle
60,300,000 for Michael Jackson. (0.12 seconds)

On Google Caffeine
News at the top and videos in the middle (with images added recently)
179,000,000 for Michael Jackson (0.09 seconds)

On Bing.com
News at top with one listing and one video (categories on side)
112,000,000 results for Michael Jackson (no speed display).

Still in its early phase of development, Caffeine appears to be concentrating on text-based keyword searches as of now. It trims out the images in its web search and just displays the news and videos for the keywords. Image and video search are not yet implemented within Caffeine, so let’s assume more of this is coming in later versions.

Bing.com has a clear priority for user layout and a visual design. It searches keywords, and then defines into categories, whereas Google.com and Caffeine both keep broadly defined categories in the left column. Speed of results is not displayed in Bing.com either, which may or may not be of importance to anyone but people like us measuring search speeds.

An example of this not working so well for Bing yet: try searching for Microsoft.

• Bing provided 241,000,000 results
• compared with 631,000,000 on Caffeine and
• 508,000,000 on Google.com.

Results in Google rank Microsoft’s corporate site, downloads, then support. Bing bam boom – that’s what we need. Bing’s search offers the corporate site, then Clip Art, (really? Clip art?), then support and so on.

What does this mean for keywords and SEO?
Well, it means keywords are becoming all the more important doesn’t it?
Social Media keywords are priority. First, social media sites are assigned priority in results. Google just searches the keyword we type into its already crawled database). So tweet, facebook, and link up on linkedin, because they are coming up first. Tackle your social media with fresh, regular content charged with targeted keywords and you’ll be in good shape. Of note is that Bing.com results do not include linkedin.com links in our searches, though Caffeine does.

These changes affect advertising too. Bing.com seems to be using a very broad keyword swipe when displaying ads, which becomes annoying. Adwords get more important with these new search engines too. “A search for PHP in BING showed up just 592,000,000 results. This would certainly be a huge setback when compared with Google’s search results. Also, I seriously hated the advertisements here. Why would a PHP programmer need to look at web hosting adverts when he is actually looking to find some solutions for his code!”

How is approach by web and content developers going to be affected by this continuing race to improve search engines? For sure, keywords need to be more specific and social media site content should include them and update them. For Amit’s prediction, he will not say that the race for the best search engine ends here, especially with Caffeine appearing to be on a long-term build. “Google has dominated the search market for years and it will definitely continue to do so for another 4-6 years. But, when biggies like Microsoft and Yahoo are in the list, Google is still under threat from them.”