Google Caffeine: A Detailed Test of the New Google

Did you hear? Google’s launching a new, upgraded version of its search engine soon. And just as important, the search giant released the developer’s preview of it today. Google (Google) promises that the new search tool (codename “Caffeine”) will improve the speed, accuracy, size, and comprehensiveness of Google search.

While the developer version is a pre-beta release, it’s completely usable. Thus, we’ve decided to put the new Google search through the wringer. We took the developer version for a spin and compared it to not only the current version of Google Search (Google search), but to Bing (Bing) as well.

The categories we tested the new search engine on are as follows: speed, accuracy, temporal relevancy, and index size. Here’s how we define those:

Speed: How fast can the new search engine load results?

Accuracy: Which set of results is more accurate to the search term?

Temporal Relevancy: Is one version of search better at capturing breaking news?

Index Size: Is it really more comprehensive than the last version of Google?
1.SPEED------
The first category is incredibly important. How fast do these Google search results come at you anyway? Even a tenth of a second can mean millions for the search company as the longer it takes the load, the more likely someone will go look for results somewhere else.

So how fast is the new search? Lightning fast. As you probably know, Google tells you how long it takes to load results. We tried a few search terms, starting with “Dog.” Here’s the speed result:


Compare that to the original Google search:


0.12 vs. 0.25 seconds? They doubled the speed! That’s tremendous.