Bing, Microsoft’s Search Engine, has just reached their first birthday. I am not sure if anybody noticed or if ant SEOs actually care. After all, this is pretty much a one horse Google race. Bing was introduced in June of 2009 and has steadily grown it’s market share over the last year.

Research firms have calculated that Bing’s market share is anywhere from 9.43 to 11.8 percent in the United States. Bing and Yahoo! are still in the process of integrating both search engines into a more formidable opponent for the three ton elephant, known as Google.

Bing and Yahoo! better come up with something quite revolutionary in order to compete with Google Caffeine which is providing fresher content in their SERPS, Search Engine Result Pages.

According to Google, caffeine has changed the way that Google is indexing information into their data centers. Not only is Google delivering the results much faster ( by about 50%) they are indexing much more information as well. They are delivering more search results than ever before. As peoples’ expectancies for the best search results increases, so does Google’s desire to deliver the most relevant results. If you are an SEO, it is more important than ever to help your client deliver  quality content to their audience as well as get them quality back links. The game of SEO is ever changing, and the rules are different for each search engine. It is more important now, more than ever, to select an SEO company, that offers a full online marketing plan rather than just a simple SEO strategy.

Google is now pushing site owners to embrace a wider marketing strategy online, rather  than back linking alone. Blogs are more important than ever because they post new fresh content, and with Google showing real time results in their SERPs from social sites like Twitter, which gets well over 19 billion searches each and every month, businesses should jump on board rather than wait and react.

As more people search online and as Google has more data that tracks users’ search habits and queries, Google will only get better and the sites that make it onto that precious first page, will need to get better too!

I remember when I first switched over to Google as my search engine of choice. This was in the early 2000s. I had regularly used Yahoo to that point, but I would often find myself having to run different queries in order to get what I was after. Basically, they were not delivering the results that I was looking for.  Thus, began my dabbling with other search engines of the day.

What I loved about Google (and still do) is that they more often understood my intent the first time around when I searched, and I also liked their no nonsense interface that was not all cluttered with ads and news items. The accuracy of their search results outperformed the other search engines and this is what has kept me and many others hooked on Google to this day.

With Google Caffeine, Google has taken a step further in understanding a searcher’s intent by delivering what is known as blended results. Blended search results are nothing new, but now Google has perfected them a bit more. With the new Google SERP, you can now be shown images, news, twitter posts, Google Products, videos and related searches based on your query. Google is also more quickly sifting through the value of Social Media sites by delivering the most relevant sites higher in their SERPS for a given topic.

Google is not just providing their search results faster. They are also providing relevant results faster for your search. This helps Google keep the Lion’s share of  the searches performed by end users.

Google knows human behavior quite well. Maybe they know us even better than they care to admit. One thing that is certain, when it comes to search behavior, is that we want our results relevant and fast. That is why Google has focused on delivering their results even faster than before. The Google search engine has always been quick, but now it’s faster than ever. Many tests that we have recently been run on the beta version of Caffeine have shown that search results are being delivered at an average of twice as fast, when compared to the last version of Google search enigine.

You can tell how fast Google is delivering search results, because they publish the speed at which at they delivered your search query on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). This appears right next to the number of results that there are for your keyword.

For example, when I search the term “google caffeine”, the following data is published by Google on the SERP.

It is impossible to compare the search results for keywords against such sites as Bing and Yahoo since they do not publish the speed at which they deliver their SERPs, and who can blame them. There is no sense publishing this data unless they are up to speed with Google.

We live in a microwave society today to say the least. We want everything done for us our way and in an instant. That is why Google has tweeked this part of their search engine. It’s just one more way for them to stay ahead in the search engine marketing game.

Every so often Google updates their algorithm for their massively popular search engine. When they perform such updates, many site owners brace themselves for the worst. After all, Google updates have names just like Florida hurricanes do. In fact , the Google search engine update of 2003 is known as the “Florida Update.” This update alone put businesses out of business in a day.

This time around, Google has been kinder to web masters and website owners by giving them a preview of what’s to come next. They are not just trying to be kind to web masters, but to web searchers too. After all, without the web searchers, they have no business and if web searchers are not happy with search results, they will head off to Bing or Yahoo. Now, that is what Google does not want.

By allowing web masters a sneak peek into Google Caffeine, Google was able to get input from web masters as to what they thought about Caffeine as well as help them iron out any programming bugs. It does seem a bit odd that web masters and Google could get along so well albeit for a brief time.

The main reason the Google updated their search engine is because they want to stay ahead in the search engine game. Google has no plans of being nice in the war for search users. After all, they are a publicly traded company, and they have shareholders to answer to.

Now in defense of Google, a search engine’s job is only getting harder and harder as more and more web pages are being published all over the world in multiple languages everyday. So as you can imagine, speed is of the essence. Thus, Google has appropriately named their latest search engine incarnation, Google Caffeine. It’s the fastest search engine to date.