A hot cup of Google Caffeine

Another google newbie, codenamed Caffeine has been announced this week. This update is mostly backend stuff so you wont see a lot of difference in the new search facility at first. Apparently they are 'rewriting the foundations of the infrastructure' - predictions are of up to 100% speed increase. I would think they will also be rewriting a new search API which will take advantage of some of the newer facilities of the product, however no comment has been made on how this will be affected as yet.

This announcement comes not long after the launch of Microsoft Bing, which is the most serious contender for Google's crown of dominance in recent years. Last month Bing's share of the search market went up 0.1% - not a great change, but if this continues to gain momentum, we might see a change in the search engine landscape, and with Bing possibly being integrated into windows mobile devices and even in-car application, we might see more avenues of search than ever before.

Another worry for google is that microsoft and Yahoo have come to an arrangement whereby microsoft will concentrate more on searchn and yahoo more on online advertising. A sensible move considering the relative strength of the yahoo advertising brand and the potential power of microsoft's new search engine strategy. Although google currently holds over 70% market share compared with Bing's 8%, it doesnt take long for a new, better technology to dominate in the online survival of the fittest race. Remember when Netscape was the daddy of browsers? It took microsoft 2 short years to overturn this, and now, Internet Explorer 6 is still the most popular web browser in the world (despite suggestions to withdraw support from companies like You Tube and Facebook calling for it to be axed due to the inherant problems of recoding and hacking websites to be IE6 compliant.