Is Caffeine Behind Broken UK SERPs?

Google LogoIn a post on the Webmaster Central Blog, Google have announced the immediate availability of a test sandbox for what they are calling “Caffeine”. Described as “the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions”, Caffeine is a looking glass into the future SERPs.

The real question though is: is Caffeine the reason the UK SERPs are broken?


In my opinion, there’s a reasonably strong case to assume as much. Caffeine is labelled as “a next-generation architecture” and Google are asking for feedback in the results returned. In other words, this is most likely a dual update:

  1. to how Google stores the data in its infrastructure (perhaps an update to BigTable?)
  2. to the ranking algorithm itself

Now, the current mess in the UK SERPs is clearly not just an algorthmic one – there also seems to be some funky crawl/index issues going on.

If that wasn’t the case, then we simply wouldn’t be seeing such a large influx of .nz/.au etc URLs. I think this is probably an issue that the GOOG have been aware of for some time, whereby the crawl/index routines are not sufficiantly separating foreign domains from country-specific indexes. I believe it was further compounded by an algorithmic error whereby foreign domains were not devalued to the extent they should be. Sure, ‘international english’ domains have ranked in UK SERPs before, but never to this extent – and to see amazon.com ranking above amazon.co.uk for example is a clear indicator of error IMO.

Caffeine is a good reason why the broken SERP issue has not been acknowledged by any of the powers that be at Google. They knew they had a team of engineers frantically beavering away on the new system and simply couldn’t tackle, what they considered to be, a temporary problem.

Let’s hope they can fully beta test and rollout Caffeine sooner rather than later. You can help by hitting the sandbox and providing feedback in the usual place.