Caffeine is the code word for Google’s latest version of its search engine algorithm, the first major upgrade since 2006. The buzzword with caffeine is “real time search,” meaning you can find Tweets and other real-time results when you search. The new search engine is a lot faster, and is gradually rolling out one data center at a time.

With the new search engine, content is still very much king. The real-time features will tend to boost social media sites that are discussing relevant topics. The age of the site will no longer matter as much as it used to.

However, and this is important for anyone with a website they want to rank high in the search engine results pages, the speed with which your page loads is going to be even more important. People are impatient, and they don’t want to wait around for a page to load, particularly when there are millions of other pages available that might load faster, so if you have a slow-loading site, beware.

One thing that people asked for while Google was in the “sandbox” phase of developing the new engine is for sites that haven’t been updated in a long time to rank lower, and while it isn’t certain yet, it is widely anticipated that this will indeed be the case.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Google, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.