So we’ve had a chance to have a closer look at Caffeine vs Google Old on some of our usual test phrases, and some bigger and more generic phrases  over the last few days  and make some collated data observations past the main one “click here” from the previous post on the subject.

Before we start, links where credit is due, these are the tools we’re mainly using:-

• http://www.facesaerch.com/caffeine/ – compare old to new side-by-side.

• Kyle Hasegawa’s Firefox Caffeine plugin – slots in next to Joost’s de-personalized in Firefox.

So here are some of the things we’ve been observing so far, although if you’re looking much you will see the results changing constantly, sites and pages are dropping in and out of the Caffeine SERP as G  continually tweak their dials.

• Firstly, and crucially to many, as pointed out by Vizion Interactive Caffeine is using a  new URL structure which may once again break everybody’s 3rd party toys

• Sitelinks are seemingly handled / showing differently on Caffeine. The “Ibiza blog” search (below) shows this pretty clearly, the same site is at #1, but now shows 6  sitelinks instead of the previous 8, and doesn’t show the second page listing from the site below the sitelinks anymore.

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• Speed - people are talking about it being super-fast, but were not really seeing much difference in user experience thus far, but where it does seem much faster is in finding and ranking new pages, sites and changed pages. Coincidentally we happened to be launching a brand new site just as Caffeine went live, it ranks on the first page already on Caffeine, (2 days from indexing on old Google) but is still in the high 80′s on GoogleOLD. – It could of course be that there are various filters not yet applied to the new version, we will see in due time.

• Index size – currently inconclusive as about 50% of the time the Caffeine index is larger, and the other half, it’s smaller. What it never seems to be is the same.

• Related Search – some significant differences here in some places (see screenshot for examples) almost like it’s a different system at work. In other searches it’s identical.

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Conclusions

Those of us who are used to looking at multiple keywords across multiple indexes are used to seeing small differences across datacenters anyway, geo-tweaking of results, the odd 2 or 3 sites shuffled or swapped around in results, and to the most part that’s what Caffeine looks like, we do believe  Google when they say that the general public will probably not notice any differences whatsoever.

But to the trained eye, Caffeine does seem to be doing a better job at filtering out not only spammy sites, but also sites ranking on spammy (article) marketing, so it now hopefully looks as though SEO v1.0 is  finally facing it’s last walk to the gallows.

Possibly connected to the above, we are still left with a strong gut feeling that the recently speculated “anchor text de-weighting “is playing  out even more heavily in this Caffeinated SERP now, and certain test sites do seem to also imply that, (plus the sudden change on “click here” after 8 years of dominance) but of course there could be a million other factors we can never know too, so firm conclusions cannot be drawn easily.

In our humble opinions the sooner they roll this out, the better.