SEO news - Faster and better Google search engine under development

A faster Google is being developed to improve results for search engine users and to combat competitive threats posed by rivals Microsoft and Yahoo.

Search engine optimisation firms and industry experts are closely monitoring the new project, called Caffeine, because already changes have been noticed in site rankings.

Principal Google engineer Matt Cutts said the update is mainly "under the hood" and has involved re-writing search engine infrastructure foundations.

He said, "It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed,
accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions."

Google is allowing webmasters and SEOs to preview the project at http://www2.sandbox.google.com

In the last few months Microsoft has revamped its search engine, rebranding and calling it Bing, while claiming it performs more intuitive searches. However, Google remains the world's most dominant search engine, enjoying almost 80 per cent market share in the UK.

According to initial checks by some experts, social web results are already demonstrating major rankings boosts - for Facebook and Twitter pages.

Econsultancy's Patricio Robles said, "Google is not only placing increasing emphasis on pages in the social web but is getting better at sorting out which social web results are 'the real deal' and which are spam."

As a result, many website staff, eCommerce teams and online marketers will need to consider the links - such as for rankings, traffic and conversions - between social media and search engine optimisation.