google new search tricks

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Did you hear? Google’s launching a new, upgraded version of its search engine soon. And just as important, the search giant released the developer’s preview of it today. Google () promises that the new search tool (codename “Caffeine”) will improve the speed, accuracy, size, and comprehensiveness of Google search. While the developer version is a pre-beta release, it’s completely usable. Thus, we’ve decided to put the new Google search through the wringer. We took the developer version for a spin and compared it to not only the current version of Google Search, but to Bing () as well.
The categories we tested the new search engine on are as follows: speed, accuracy, temporal relevancy, and index size. Here’s how we define those:

Speed: How fast can the new search engine load results?
Accuracy: Which set of results is more accurate to the search term?
Temporal Relevancy: Is one version of search better at capturing breaking news?
Index Size: Is it really more comprehensive than the last version of Google?

So without further ado, here’s the test:

1. Speed

---

The first category is incredibly important. How fast do these Google search results come at you anyway? Even a tenth of a second can mean millions for the search company as the longer it takes the load, the more likely someone will go look for results somewhere else.
So how fast is the new search? Lightning fast. As you probably know, Google tells you how long it takes to load results. We tried a few search terms, starting with “Dog.” Here’s the speed result:

Compare that to the original Google search:

0.12 vs. 0.25 seconds? They doubled the speed! That’s tremendous. We tried it with a variety of search terms (”The end of the universe is not here,” “There is no way that you cannot find ben parr. He is hiding back behind the tv,” “FriendFeed (),” etc.), and in every instance, the new Google won.
The only potential weak spot was when we added search commands like quotes, subtraction signs, and more. In this case, it was a 50/50 shot as to which Google search was faster.
As for comparing it to Bing: Well, they don’t display how fast it generates results. It’ll have to sit out this speed test for now.
Winner: The New Google

2. Accuracy

---

While more subjective, accuracy is probably the issue that users care about most. Does the search engine find what you want on the first try? Well, we did our subjective test. New version: