Tim Acheson's web site & blog

Predictably, yesterday's news is generating a lot of hype and hysteria. Everybody wants a piece of the action. People are so keen to have a say, it seems many of them do so without reading Google's announcement, since a number of commentators seem to have missed the point of this test.

The Daily Telegraph in the UK provides a typical example:

Martin McNulty, director of search marketing specialist, Trafficbroker, who has tried the new version, said: “Google's caffeine is undoubtedly faster, almost twice as fast at times. It's like a Google GTi.

The excitement is more infectious than swine flu. That single quote turned into the headline: "Google reveals caffeine: a new faster search engine".

In reality, this test is not about the speed with which results are returned. I wouldn't suggest it's faster, either, and if I did we could safely assume it's because the new version has very much less traffic. The sandbox test probably has a tiny fraction of one percent of the load on the existing search engine.

As Google points out, the change only affects the infrastructure, and the only mention of speed is "indexing speed" which means the speed with which Google captures useful data as it crawls the web. As Google points out:-

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.

It's an endless source of entertainment, to see how the power of suggestion affects the psychology of other commentators. Google’s reputation is literally intoxicating -- intelligent adults abandon rational thought under its influence. Is there an implicit assumption that anything Google does must be impressive in every imaginable way? "Wow, Google did something, so it must work faster now!"

I noticed that the BBC jumped on the same bandwagon as everybody else, quoting the same person as the Telegraph, and basing their headline on the same unscientific claim: "New Google 'puts Bing in shade'". This is often how mainstream "news" is generated. A spurious sensationalist quote is published somewhere, then the same thing is regurgitated elsewhere with minor adaptations, in a process of dissemination and legitimisation that can be extremely rapid. This is a good example of contemporary mass-hysteria.

Querystring Spam in Google's new search engine

Among the issues I've identified and reported so far in Google's Caffeine sandbox is an interesting form of URL manipulation Spam that I haven't seen before, which could indicate a new vulnerability.

E.g. In a search for "open directory project" the first result listed is dmoz.org. But notice that appended to the URL is the domain name of a Turkish search engine: "www.dmoz.org/?id=www.interturknet.com/".

Presumably somebody is deliberately linking to dmoz.org usng a URL with this rogue query string parameter. The problem doesn't affect the current version of Google search. I've observed this phenomenon with minor web sites before -- but never such a major URLs for which there must be millions of correct links, and an extremely high ratio of correct links vs links with querystring Spam.

Update: this update to Google's indexing system looks likely to go live soon, and the preview is now offline.

"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."