Yesterday, without much explanation or instructions, Google opened the floodgates on what it’s describing as the next generation of its search engine, most likely to test its efficiency and performance using real-world traffic. Testers are being invited to sample the new engine that Google is calling “Caffeine,” although perhaps intentionally, it isn’t yet explaining just what the differences are.
In Betanews’ initial tests Tuesday morning comparing Caffeine to Google’s current stable release, we noticed that for nearly every simple and complex search query we tried, the top three non-paid search results were always the same. But the order of results starting as high as #4, sometimes #6, changed. Usually Caffeine retrieved the same pages as the stable version, but shuffled them in a different order.
