Google to launch new search engine

Called Caffeine, the new engine has been in development for months and is designed to be "fundamentally a rewrite of our indexing system," Google engineer Matt Cutts said in a video interview recently, The Star reported.

"The idea of Caffeine is that it is more powerful, more flexible and more robust and can index documents a lot faster," he said. While "regular users" won't see much difference, "power users" will, and they've had the opportunity since August to test the search engine on a Google site.

"The feedback has been really positive," said Cutts.

Google has just posted this message on the test site: "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. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given."

Once Google is happy with the results at one data centre, it will move the engine to more and more data centres, he said.

Cutts compared Caffeine to the Big Daddy update of 2005-6 and called it "fundamentally a big change."