Google is trying out a new search architecture in an attempt to make its search service faster, more comprehensive and more accurate.
The new architecture, code-named Caffeine, was revealed on Monday on the company's Webmaster Central blog, when staff software engineer Sitaram Iyer and principal engineer Matt Cutts called on developers to help test it out and feed comments back to the team.
"For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search," the pair wrote. They said Caffeine was intended to boost the search engine's index size, indexing speed and accuracy.
Caffeine is currently available as a sandboxed web-developer preview, but is open to any user who wants to try it. Iyer and Cutts wrote that as the new architecture does not affect the user interface, most users will not notice any difference from a standard Google search.
"This update is primarily under the hood: we're rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure," Cutts wrote in a separate blog post on Monday. "But some of the search results do change, so we wanted to open up a preview so that power searchers and web developers could give us feedback."
Caffeine's development had nothing to do with Microsoft's recent search tie-up with Yahoo, a Google spokesman told ZDNet UK on Tuesday. The Microsoft-Yahoo alliance is seen as providing stronger competition for Google, the overwhelming market leader in search.
"[Caffeine] is part of an ongoing process — we're always trying to improve these things," the Google spokesman said. "We think competition is a good thing, but we would have made these changes anyway."
The spokesman declined to comment on the specifics of the new architecture, saying Google "does not go into detail" about how its search algorithms work. He also warned that, as Caffeine was currently a test, there is no guarantee that the new algorithm will be rolled out to Google's main search properties "either in full or in part".
