You could be right in your observation about Caffeine. Nevertheless, Bing has made a non-zero impact on Google. How else can one explain the sudden appearance of images and maps in Google search results since the last few weeks?

This project is about six to eight months old. So no this isn’t a sign that Google is worried of Microsoft. It is a sign that they know when it is time for them to reinvent themselves and not get too caught up in their past.

So is Caffeine a proof that Google is scared of MS, that they decided that something has to be done quickly so as to retain the market shares? Is Google shaken?

Firstly most people don’t click on the 2nd and subsequent search result pages of Google. If you don’t believe this, do a quick survey with your friends and family – how many people go to the second or subsequent pages of a Google search result. In most cases, the several thousands of pages that are indexed by Google only to be listed in the second or subsequent pages of the search result is the equivalent of the “haystack”. The needle is in the first page that google throws up. There’s a lot of technology that goes into creating the “haystack”. But what matters is the “needle”.

Secondly, let’s talk about that needle. The first page that Google throws up is a combination of technology and manual fine-tuning. Oftentimes one can wonder if the first page is indeed largely predictable – for example, there is almost always a link to a wikipedia page, whatever it is that you are trying to search. If you are searching places, then there is wikitravel and lonelyplanet thrown in. If you are searching for people, then facebook and linkedin are the usual suspects. One can go on similarly for different types of search terms…. The question that this leads to is – how much is the unique consumer value of the first page of a search result? As a consumer, I would define “Unique consumer value” as the set of links that are highly relevant to my search, but are not obvious (for example, not wikipedia, because I can directly search the wikipedia from my browser, without having to visit Google in the first place).

Yes, Google throws up huge search results in an incredible amount of time. For example, I searched “vietnam” and got 166000000 results in 0.26 seconds, but the first page contained a number of “predictable” entries (wikipedia, wikitravel, lonelyplanet). Since most people don’t go to any of the 164999990 entries that lie beyond the first page, and since many of the entries on the first page donot need “rocket science” to show up there, the question that begs to be asked is: how important is technology for the average google search?

Thanks Googlers!