With all the current shenanigans going on between Microsoft and Yahoo! (that being that the former has struck a deal with the latter in which Yahoo!"s search engine will be powered by Bing), the technology world seems to have forgotten about Google"s plans to develop further. The company has certainly been mentioned a lot lately as a competitor, but nothing has been speculated about them improving their current offering. Now, however, according to Mashable, we"ve got a sudden announcement about the topic from the company itself. Google has been working on a re-engineered version of their search engine lately, and they"ve got a (public) developer test website to show for it.
Google said that, "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." As you will hopefully have picked up, this isn"t simply a few upgrades to the current search engine, but rather a whole new version of it.
So, are you keen to try this out for yourself? By all means, head over to the preview and give it a shot, and be sure to let us know what you think. We"ve given it a quick test ourselves by searching for Neowin on the old version of Google, and then on the new version. The results are certainly slightly different, but whether it"s a change for the better is up to the user. Again, post a comment with any feedback.