Google has revealed work on its "next-generation infrastructure".
From Google Webmaster Central Blog
"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."
Vanessa Fox speculated that "Based on the blog post, we can guess that this new infrastructure may include ways of crawling the web more comprehensively, determining reputation and authority (possibly beyond the link graph and what’s typically thought of as PageRank), and returning more relevant results more quickly, although Google’s Matt Cutts told me that the changes are “primarily in how we index”."
Caffeine: Google’s New Search Index by Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (Aug 10)
The sandbox is at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/
There is sure to be many articles on this in the coming weeks.
Posted by Gwen at August 11, 2009 12:05 PM