The SEO world is getting ready for the launch of the latest update to Google's search engine, codenamed 'Google Caffeine'.

On the surface, this may not appear to be much of a change, as the interface will remain similar to what we're all used to, but under the hood there have been some major architectural changes. These are designed to improve the speed, accuracy and volume of the results.

Speaking to ZDNet (http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,1000000097,39872563,00.htm), Google spokesman Anthony House said "The reason we are not rolling it out completely before the end of the year is because we know that for lots of webmasters the holiday period is extremely important, especially if they are in any way retail-based. We don't want them to have to worry about it in the lead-up to the holidays,".

This indicates that there could be quite a shuffle in the results algorithm, that will affect how websites rank for their targeted keywords.  Rumours have it that, just using individual keywords in a page will not hold as much weight anymore as the context of the words, including the sentence they appear in, will become more relevant (this has to be a good thing).

Mashable (http://mashable.com/2009/08/10/google-caffeine/) have performed a 'detailed' test of the new Google search tool, comparing it with the existing Google engine and Microsoft's Bing. According to Mashable, it scored well for speed, index size and with a vast improvement on temporal relevancy (indexing breaking news quickly, keeping the results relevant).

With most things Google do, we look forward to it's release and given their track record, you can't help but expect it to give the industry a little shake up.

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