Not to be outdone by the recent Bing/Yahoo! partnership and Facebook acquisition of FriendFeed, Google have gone one step further announcing a new project: a new version of Google Search.

Big news? Definitely! This isn’t just a simple update to their current search engine, but a complete overhaul and replacement.

The official word from Mr Google, Matt Cutts, is that they have been working on this project in order to improve the search engines indexing speed and returning more relevant results more quickly. Here’s more:

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.

This new announcements reminds everyone that although there have been some big changes in recent weeks to the search engine landscape, Google intends to fight to keep its 65% market share and also extend it. So take that Microsoft & Yahoo!

We took the new search engine for a test drive and here is a comparison of the results for each search engine for the query “iphone”.

On the old search engine, the news results for the iphone appeared in the top spot and video results ranked quite high on the page.

However, on the new search engine, the news results didn’t even appear on the first page and the video results appeared lower in the rankings.

If you want to give the new Google search engine a test run, you can do so here: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/. Feel free to let us know your thoughts below.

 

Courtney is an online marketing specialist at ineedhits - a leading search engine marketing firm with over 11 years experience. Courtney has been living and breathing online marketing for over 2 years. She specializes in web and permission email marketing and providing news and opinion to online marketing communities.

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