As you may know Google is making changes to the search engine. Apparently they see the emergence of other search engines like Microsoft's Bing (which is in fact quite interesting) or real-time search tools in Twitter as possible candidates for google's current search engine dismissal.
Personally that's not what troubles me. I don't use twitter and Bing just doesn't offer enough yet to justify a switch. But instead, what annoys me about google is the lack of an ability to categorize the search results list or some annoying side-effects of the PageRank, like a almost complete total inability to access the homepage of a simple shareware product that is being offered all around through download websites.
Anyways, the preview can be accessed here: Google (looks identical and it is identical. It's the engine that has changed).
An independent test can be seen here: Google Caffeine: A Detailed Test of the New Google
The test doesn't really bring much out. In fact I'm not even sure of some of the parameters (how useful it really is to go from 50 million to 300 million search results?). The speed increase is from a user standpoint rather useless also and only of importance to google.
I put it to my own testing. Basically I just wanted to see if my annoyances are addressed.
1. Categorized search results. Non existing. We still have -- and probably will have for a long time until someone tries another Cuil. But does it right this time -- a shopping list search results that is becoming increasingly passé and hard to handle.
2. Contextual relevance. Promising! I couldn't think for the life of me of a good example like so many I have encountered in the past. So I went into SnapFiles and started hunting down for a shareware/freeware product that once searched on Google would list a bunch of download sites before showing the product homepage. Sometimes even only on the second or third page. As I don't have much patience for these type of things (I'm no reviewer for pete's sake!) I was happy to find the first thing that showed a difference. "Cartoonist" is some image editing software. I typed "Cartoonist software" in the search box of both engines and on the new google, the homepage for the product came up first, whereas on the old google it came second! As I keep surfing the web I'll keep a lookout for these situations and make sure when I find something more relevant, I'll give it a shot on the new search engine. But this indeed looks promising!
