Google has its hands in plenty of projects--so many, in fact, that it often becomes fairly easy to forget that the company's primary focus is search. When Google makes some changes to its search indexing, it's a pretty big deal.
For the past few months, the company's search team has been busily working on just that, with a project called "Caffeine."

The company finally removed the shroud from Caffeine today with a blog post titled "Help Test Some Next-Generation Infrastructure," an open invite for Web developers to check out Google's "top secret project." The infrastructure improvements, Google points out, will largely go unnoticed by the Web searching populace. Web developers, however, "might notice a few differences."

Google is still in the process of developing Caffeine and is collecting feedback from users.

"Right now, we only want feedback on the differences between Google's current search results and our new system," the company wrote. "We're also interested in higher-level feedback ("These types of sites seem to rank better or worse in the new system") in addition to "This specific site should or shouldn't rank for this query." Engineers will be reading the feedback, but we won't have the cycles to send replies.
"It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions," Google added.
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So I wonder just how much better it could get. Less spam links? More direct search results? Can't wait to see how it works!