News has been out for a week or so that Google is test-driving, and encouraging others to test drive, a new search algorithm, which it calls "Caffeine." According to Google:
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.
How much do we need to worry, or at least think about it, when things are changed in the tools that we use, but where those changes don't alter the interface, but only alter functions that we as users could not have directly changed anyway? Especially now that Microsoft is ratcheting up the search engine wars again with "Bing"? And that reminds me, before we move on, who the heck came up with "Bing" as a brand name (and I'm not the only one asking)? I wanted to know, so I searched (on Google, of course), and it is supposedly either "a reference to the proverbial light bulb that goes off in your head when a good idea hits" or "the sound of found" or some related concept. That certainly clears things up for me.
Now back to the real topic of this post: why do we care what Google does? Caffeine is supposedly faster and more current, so isn't that good? Yes, but searching is a transaction cost. It's an intermediary step that's used to get to somewhere else, to either another step along the way or to some final step (an "answer," if you will). Very few people search just to search (and even if you find someone who claims to do this, you'll find it's really not the searching itself but the results that interest them). If the somewhere else that we end up at changes, then maybe we really should care (especially where one or two search engines control huge portions of the search engine market). And if we need to re-search to get the results we want or were expecting, our transaction costs rise.
When Google "dances" search results change. And that may make some people winners and others losers. Which are you (or your law school)? Google is asking is for people to test the two versions and compare results. Some testers are using their own names, but I thought I would instead search a topic now near and dear to my heart: "law school hiring." Image grabs of the results appear after the jump.
"Regular" Google Search:
Caffeine Google Search:
You can click on each of the above images and an image of the search engine results page (or, SERP, if you want to be a search engine geek) will pop-up, with 100 results for each. These are images, so you can't search for text within them, but you can go screen by screen and compare (and TypePad apparently will let you open both images in pop-ups at the same time so you can put them side by side).
The first few entries stay the same, though Caffeine breaks out an additional sub-result from the Volokh Conspiracy when compared with the current Google engine. It is when we reach result seven (which for searchers who haven't changed their Google preferences to show more than ten results is one that shows up on their SERP) that we get a change. Caffeine replaces Eisenberg and Wells's SSRN posted article on "inbreeding" in law school hiring with posts from the Legal Ethics Forum. Concurring Opinions, which showed up as eighth in Google before Caffeine, is now relegated to 14 (and to page two if we again assume ten results per page as default). These are quick examples to show you that Caffeine does change search results, and to encourage you to look yourself at how your searches and priorities might be affected.
Where do your interests lie, and what does Google Caffeine do to the placement of the results that are important to you? What about your law school? Your law school's reputation? Do the searches yourself and see (and report back if you get a minute to do so):
Google
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