Google’s Caffeine is leaving the sandbox, ladies and gents. According to EConsultancy, the search engine’s newest update will be unleashing power of incredible proportions; Google bills it as:
“the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions“.
Caffeine was presented to users along with a sandbox, to record user feedback and allow previews of results. The sandbox is no longer available, but Google’s Matt Cutts assures us it will be a happy New Year.
The feedback on Caffeine has been very positive, so we’re ready to move from the developer preview to the next stage of the roll out: going live with Caffeine at one data center. This means that a small percentage of Google’s users will benefit from the technology behind Caffeine in their regular searches.
I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays. Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays.
Will Caffeine will have a major effect on the SERPs? No-one knows, but the fact that it won’t happen until after the holidays has many marketers sighing with relief. Cutts mentioned that Google will probably reveal the IP address of the data center that gets Caffeine first, so stay tuned!