Google Unleash "Caffeine"

The battle to dethrone the King of search engines continues to take interesting twists and turns. Only recently, Microsoft launched Bing to compete with the current heavy weights i.e. Google, and promised more innovation and better value for advertisers. As if that was not enough, Microsoft went further to announce (on July 29) that a 10-year deal has been struck with Yahoo! Search engine that would see it replaced (powered) by Bing. Interestingly, all these actions have not gone unnoticed by Google hence the latest unveiling of its updated search engine, nicknamed “Caffeine” by its developers.

According to Google, their new search engine will replace the current one after completing the testing phase and it will offer users “improved speed, accuracy and comprehensiveness of search results”.It will also include real-time results and news feeds which Google predicts will ensure it maintains its current dominance in the search market that sees it boast of for example 87% of search engine users in the United Kingdom in 2008. How long this dominance will last, however, is anyone’s guess particularly because the increased competition is not limited to Microsoft alone.

Along with Wolfram Alpha (a computational knowledge search engine) and Ask Jeeves (that only recently upgraded its systems), Facebook has also joined the “search-engine tug of war”. Facebook recently announced the purchase of content-sharing service, FriendFeed – a real time feed aggregator, which conducts searches and rank results according to recent updates rather than age. Although Google denies that Caffeine has been launched in response to these recent competition that it faces, an upgrade of its search engine configuration is probably long overdue.