Today, Google officially announced their new search index, Caffeine. Caffeine is a push to keep up with the most relevant, rich content for the user. The new Google index will be searching for regularly updated content, video, images, real-time information, and anything else that can provide a better user experience. Here’s an excerpt from the Google Blog on the difference between the old and new index:

“Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.”

Google is continually updating their index and algorithm, looking for improved methods. From a search perspective, this simply means – give the user the best experience possible and you’re also serving the engine.

While being known to keep most information private, Google made a surprising move yesterday when they disclosed their AdSense revenue share.  The numbers included revenue for both AdSense for content and AdSense for search. From The Google AdSense Blog:

“AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. The remaining portion that we keep reflects Google’s costs for our continued investment in AdSense — including the development of new technologies, products and features that help maximize the earnings you generate from these ads. It also reflects the costs we incur in building products and features that enable our AdWords advertisers to serve ads on our AdSense partner sites. Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed.

We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations. As with AdSense for content, the proportion of revenue that we keep reflects our costs, including the significant expense, research and development involved in building and enhancing our core search and AdWords technologies. The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when we increased it.”

Google did not disclose revenue information for AdSense for mobile, AdSense for feeds, and AdSense for games.  They also note that AdSense for content and search varies per contract with major online publishers.

If you’ve ever felt the need to have your search history better secured, you’re in luck. Google recently announced a secured channel of search that helps protect your search terms and referrer data. Instead of the general (http://www.google.com) site, the secured site includes a SSL encyription (https://www.google.com) Here’s an excerpt from the Google Blog:

“When you search on https://www.google.com, an encrypted connection is created between your browser and Google. This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network.”

It’s important to note that Google will store your personal search queries, they just won’t share it with third parties.

The SEO implication associated with this change is that the third parties (perhaps your personal website) will not have accurate referrer data available in analytics.  It will be interesting to monitor whether this new secured search will effect traffic sources profiles and reporting.

Old Google logo (top), New Google logo (bottom)

I thought I noticed something a little different on the Google homepage this morning. Well, it turns out my eyes were not fooling me, today Google announced some new updates to their design.

Google’s goal was to add more “personality and playfulness” to their design.  They didn’t stop at the logo, they’ve also updated the search options panel and footer. Read more about the changes on the Official Google Blog.

AdWords has recently taken their ‘Remarketing’ option for the Content network out of beta. Remarketing allows us to target a set of ads only to users that have previously visited your site (or even a particular page of your site). It’s an obvious boon for brand advertising, but also provides a great opportunity for ecommerce and lead generation: by excluding visitors who have converted on your site, we can target ads only to customers who are aware of your brand but have not converted. If we want to get even more specific, we could target people who have visited a manufacturer(brand) page on your site, and create ads specific to that manufacturer!

Remarketing works by placing a tracking pixel (similar to Google conversion tracking) on each page of your website that constitutes an “audience” – most commonly every page of your site, to define ‘all site visitors’. Then, you can target the entire content network, but only show up for the limited audience you’ve defined.

Last Friday, Google officially announced that site speed has become a factor in their ranking algorithm.  This doesn’t come to a surprise as Matt Cutts has been quoted several times giving indication at just how important site speed will be this year.

While site speed is an important factor in rankings (and retaining users), it’s not something to start panicking about. The Google Webmaster Central Blog explains that site speed will currently only affect less than 1% of search queries.

“While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.”

For Webmasters in worry, the post also outlines free tools to evaluate your own site speed:

Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.
WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance plus an optimization checklist.
In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We’ve also blogged about site performance.

Overall, site speed being added as a ranking factor reaffirms Google’s goal to provide the best search experience to all users.

Well, we love April Fools here around the office.  We love it so much that we were this close to saran-wrapping the men’s toilet this morning.  We decided against it though, seeing as how the economy is tough and we’d probably be out of a job.

Who else loves April Fools?  Google!  Check out all the crazy pranks they’re playing on unsuspecting internet-combers today:

Yep, Google is Topeka in honor of Topeka changing their name to Google, Kansas last month.  They did it in hopes that they would win the nation-wide race to be the first city to get Google’s experimental high-speed fiber optic technology.  They’re back to normal now that it’s April, but we admire their commitment.

For a list of compiled Google pranks, check out Search Engine Land.

And they’re not the only ones.  Check out the headlines at Wikipedia News today:

Today, I was buzzed at work.  Okay, forgive the terrible pun.  The office mates and I were discussing whether or not we like Google’s latest venture into social media.  Carly, our SEO Manager, has the mobile version on her phone and likes that it shows people nearby.  However, we are all fairly unimpressed with the Gmail version.  It feels like a mass Instant Message and G chat status.  It’s nice that it automatically follows friends, but it’s also odd that you cannot be voluntarily anonymous like on Twitter.  Also, how are we encouraged to find and follow more people?  On the mobile version, we can find people near us.  On the Gmail version, we are talking to the people we already talked to.  With Twitter; however, I can search by area or trending topic and find people interested in the same things as I am.  We’re all unsure which category to fit Buzz into.  Isn’t it going to drive me crazy to see everyone’s constant flow of Picasa, Flickr and Google Reader activity?  I already turned on my filter so that my inbox won’t be flooded with replies from friends.  What is your opinion of this latest craze?  Will it fade in and out like Google Wave or be the proverbial “Twitter killer”?

We are all anticipating the arrival of the Google Buzz icon in our gmail inboxes.  Google has announced that it will be rolling out its new product within the next few days and if you already have a Gmail account, you will automatically have a Google Buzz account.  Buzz will also start following the people you chat and e-mail with the most.  Search Engine Land has a thorough article about everything the new product will offer, but here are some key features that are exciting us for Google Buzz:

No sign-up or setup.

Sharing pictures, websites, status updates, messages, etc. can be completely public or limited to just your friends.

Buzz can display updates from other sites like Flickr, Picasa and Twitter.

Buzz will recommend other people’s updates and put them in your feed according to your interests (and it has a ‘not interested’ feature).

Buzz Mobile will have all of these features, but additionally, will focus on more location-specific updates.

Check out this demo on YouTube:

What do you think about the addition of Buzz to your social media arsenal?  Is it going to be a Twitter or Facebook killer?  For location-specific posts, it will be very interesting to see how it interacts with the blogging world.

Photo courtesy of kevin.lexblog.com

Google Reader has introduced a new feature that allows you to be notified when a page has updated content, even if you’re not subscribed to the RSS feed.  Feeds are a great way to keep updated on the happenings of your favorite websites and Google Reader is simply ensuring that the updated information is always available to you.  This, in addition to the establishment of real-time search results, simply reiterates how important it is to keep your website constantly updated with the correct information and properly managed content.

For more information, check out Google’s announcement on their blog here.