Google Caffeine - When should the tweaking stop?

Google Caffeine has recently been made available to the public as a new Beta search engine. Based on experience, that means it will stay in beta for about 4 years.

After experimenting with the new search engine, one (being me) begins to question if the tweaking being performed by Google is really worth the effort? Performing side by side searches of the existing Google and the new Caffeine, resulted in extremely similar search results on the initial page, but a number of different results on subsequent pages.

My search for ‘Plane Crash Kokoda’ resulted in about 16,000 results in 0.16 seconds in Caffeine, and 12,000 results in 0.17 seconds in Google. Scanning through the results, both should News results but the headings were different with Caffeine showing results from 5 hours ago instead of 11 hours ago for Google.

As for websites listed, 9 of the first 10 results were the same however entry 5 in Google was entry 8 in Caffeine. What was interesting in the results from this search was the second page. Google returned entries mostly hosted by news sites, while Caffeine showed more results about Kokoda itself. Obviously, there have been some changes to the algorithms being employed at the two sites, but are the change worth it?

People who make their money from SEO will obviously be taking a keen look at the modified search engine, hoping and praying they retain or improve their position in the result set. But as an end user is my experience or my desire for information going to be sated by the new engine? With so much information, you don’t know what you don’t know.

Leading on from this, with such market dominance, is Google actually good for knowledge? I was recently involved in a discussion about the future of technology including looking at some of the negative side effects of technology. One high on the list was ‘Googlisation’, where everyone is seeing the same results and looking at the same set of web pages, irrespective of how beneficial the result were themselves. There was also discussion around the amount of time spent on the web which lead to ‘Google Guts’ but that’s for another time.

With only a few main players in the search space the results may not be the best, but until something comes along that can guarantee ‘quality’ results, we are left at the mercy of those who will ‘Do no evil’.