Google just recently opened up a preview of their infrastructure update called “Caffeine”.

Caffeine is the first step in the process of creating ‘a next-generation architecture’ for Google Search.  Matt Cutts, a Google engineer, discusses Caffeine on his own blog in a video interview with Mike McDonald. As Matt explains, “It tries to be a lot more powerful, a lot more flexible, and a lot more robust in how we index, so that lets you in theory scale up to a lot more documents, but also lets you index those documents a lot faster.”

All of the changes have been made behind-the-scenes, so Google will not appear any different to you. What may change is some of the search results. However many people won’t even notice much of a difference here either. The people who may notice the results are web developers and ‘power searchers’.

You can experiment with a preview of the new infrastructure yourself by visiting http://www2.sandbox.google.com/. Conduct some searches and see what you think. Google is also collecting feedback which will be read by the engineers. To submit your feedback click on the link, at the bottom of the search results page, that says “Dissatisfied? Help us improve”. (more…)

Danny Dover gave a great tip about bit.ly in the talk “Make SEO Tools Work for You” at the SEOmoz 2009 PRO Training Series.

You may already know what bit.ly is, but for those of you who don’t, it is a great, free tool that you can use to shorten URLs. A shortened URL can be very convenient especially for social media sites. For example, Twitter only allows 140 characters on a tweet, so if you want to add a link to a different site a shortened URL will take up less character space.

For example O’Rourke recently wrote an article, which we posted on our blog, called “Don’t Hide from TripAdvisor Reviews!” We wanted to put a link to this article on Twitter so we entered the URL in bit.ly and they automatically shortened it for us. Below are some screenshots of this very easy process. (more…)