Almost 3 months ago Google announced a major change in it’s search infrastructure dubbed “Caffeine”. Now finally today it seems hat the giant has finally spoke again after months of silence about Google’s Caffeine announcement.  First we will look at the original announcement.

Here was the official post from Google. back in August

“Help test some next-generation infrastructure Monday, August 10, 2009 at 4:14 PM Webmaster Level: All

To build a great web search engine, you need to:

1. Crawl a large chunk of the web.
2. Index the resulting pages and compute how reputable those pages are.
3. Rank and return the most relevant pages for users’ queries as quickly as possible.

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. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Some parts of this system aren’t completely finished yet, so we’d welcome feedback on any issues you see. We invite you to visit the web developer preview of Google’s new infrastructure at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and try searches there.

Right now, we only want feedback on the differencesbetween Google’s current search results and our new system. We’re also interested in higher-level feedback (“These types of sites seem to rank better or worse in the new system”) in addition to “This specific site should or shouldn’t rank for this query.” Engineers will be reading the feedback, but we won’t have the cycles to send replies.

Here’s how to give us feedback: Do a search at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says “Dissatisfied? Help us improve.” Click on that link, type your feedback in the text box and then include the word caffeine somewhere in the text box. Thanks in advance for your feedback!

It appears that finally this new infrastructure is about to go live. Many of us have been watching the Caffeine test data center very closely and are welcoming the changes. Now today if you go to http://www2.sandbox.google.com/  you will get this message.

“Sandbox is retired…..
—————————–
We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.
Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.”

 Here are some thoughts from forum posters at webmasterworld

“Finally! Now lets see what transpires as its deployed to the DC’s.”

“ 

It might be common knowledge but I’ve just been looking for how google might test Caffeine in real time and tried www4.google.com .

All the other datacentres seem to redirect me to .co.uk, but this one is different. It also is missing any celebration logo. I’d be interested if anyone else had seen it and their theories.”

“

This is a bit worrying, it sounds like they only listened to possitive stuff and disregarded the negative and constructive criticism.

It reminds me of a campaign I was once involved in to get the admissions policy of a school changed. The local authority went out to “public consultation”. We discovered that in order to provide input you were required to get a form, complete it and send it back by a given date. I got hold of the .pdf and printed out a few hundred copies of the form and distributed this with a reply paid envelope and a leaflet explaining how important the change was to our local children and how to complete the form. Almost 100 people returned the form positively supporting the proposal to change, only four from other communities, that had something to lose, replied arguing against the change. As a result we won.”

Update from Matt Cutts 

“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.”

Todd

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