I love google, they are one of the new wonders of the world in my eyes. I use about 10 google products on a daily basis, from searching, email, google docs, google reader through to more obscure google services like insights.
Seeing as google pretty much owns the world of internet searches and those searches may be bringing you 100% of your visitors its pretty important when they change something.
Google is about to roll out a significant update to its search engine, the biggest change since 2005. Its been christened “Caffiene” and its available for the public to try out right now. So what is changing that you need to worry about?
Speed
The speed it returns your results is going to get twice as fast. In reality its always been pretty quick so not a big one for us users.
Autocomplete
You may well have seen this in action on googles existing search as it can be turned on. In simple terms autocomplete guesses what your searching for as your typing and gives you suggestions based on that.
Social & Realtime
Its no big secret in search engine circles that Google has a little bit of Twitter envy. The new search engine will be looking much closer at the twitter and facebook . Realtime search results are one of the significant missing parts of the current google setup.
My personal feeling here is that some kind of social ranking will be measured. People who have more follwers than they are following shows authority and google will take note of that.
Theres never been a more important time to setup and manage your twitter and facebook pages.
Potentially big changes in your position
The likelihood is that you may well be moving up or down in the search engine rankings. So far all my clients appear to have been effected by the updates positively. Google has been waging a war since day one with the search engine optimisers and every year google gets cleverer at pushing out the spam. Good quality backlinks, strong internet brand recognition and authority are all fundamental in keeping up top.
