A few weeks ago Google published a post on the webmaster central blog that some next-generation infrastructure project about to effect how the Google Search is going to take place and they call it “Google Caffeine”.

An interview with Matt Cutts at SES San Jose was published a few days later at WebProNews.com providing some high-level overview. In this interview and subsequent posts, Cutts down-played the change as less to do with algorithmic ranking changes and focused on the coding enhancements this update will give Google.

The purpose of this update is for Google to better index and return results on the rapidly expanding web and not directly to effect search results. This does mean that results changes will inherently happen. To give webmasters a preview of what Google Caffeine will do they setup a sandbox for testing. Facesaerch’s Caffeine Compare is a handy new tool that directly compares the search results side-by-side.

1.    Video Results More Prevalent With Google Caffeine:

After conducting several searches on celebrities and well known people you can see immediate change in the results for media types other than standard web pages.

For example, if you do a search for “Michael Jordan” in Google today the 4th listing is image results and the last results are book results about Jordan.  With Google Caffeine search results we get no results for images our books, but get more video options!

If you have videos that are not published on YouTube.com then now is the time to upload them, because Caffeine is going to give them higher rankings than before.

2.    Keywords in URL are more important than ever:

If you sell a single product or service and that word is not in your URL consider re-branding your domain on the web to something that does. Even before Google Caffeine was tested we say Google search results trending to rank URL’s higher based heavily on the domain name.

We recommend you keep your brand or acronym URL is you got one, but if you are considering purchasing a new URL or re-branding then consider your main keyword in the URL for better search results in Google.

3.    Social Sites & Immediacy Results Enter SERP’s (sort of):

When news breaks who do you go to on the web? If you are like most people you likely answered CNN, FOX, TWITTER, Facebook, YAHOO, etc – anything but Google right?

Google wants to curb this online behavior and are exhibiting so in some of the search results in Caffeine. This is so they can become not just the best everyday search engine, but also your online destination source for hot topics and current events too.

The chalenge lies with doing this, while not losing what makes their algorithm the best in biz for search. When it comes to satisfying immediacy while remaining reputable, and reliable for everyday search, no one has accomplished this – not even Google.

The death of Michael Jackson is the best case study for online search facilitating breaking news. Danny Dover at SEOMOZ had a great post on Michael Jackson’s death traveling the web. In this posts he timelines out how major websites were handling the information and displaying in search results.

I’m sure Google hated to see thousands of visitors flock to TMZ’s site for the latest info on Michael Jackson, but this is something Google is not good at. In fact, Google susceptible to false claims if they try to hard with real-time search. Losing credibility by having a “Jeff Goldblum Will Be Missed” it is hilarious,  but not something you to have happen often.

Is the best future for Google to be really great at what they do now; or gamble with real-time search?

I’ll leave this for you to decided. I would appreciate any comments on this.