Yesterday, Google unveiled a preview of their new search engine improvements, codenamed “Caffeine”. You can take it for a spin yourself here (http://www2.sandbox.google.com/). The Google team promises the new search tool will improve the speed, accuracy, size, and comprehensiveness of Google search.
So why would Google bother with a big update to their search technology? They are already dominating the search engine industry. From a developers perspective, I think there are a couple key principles we can learn from Google on this.
Never Be Satisfied
First, never be satisfied that your system is as good as it can possibly be. There is always room for improvement. Matt Cutts, a software engineer at Google, jokes that the half life of code at Google is six months. Meaning “that you can write some code and when you circle back around in six months, about half of that code has been replaced with better abstractions or cleaner infrastructure.” I love this. Most people stop at the “If it ain’t broke, then don’t try to fix it” level of quality, but I prefer to think in terms of “Just because it is working doesn’t mean that we can’t make it better.” Google is always looking for ways to make their product better, even though they are already the best in their industry.
Improving Your Product From The Inside Out
Second, not all improvements are about new bells and whistles and fancy looking user interfaces. Sometimes the best thing a company can do to improve their product is focus on the core of that system and improve it from the inside out. This is what Google is doing with the “Caffeine” release. If you set the sandbox version next to the current live version of Google, you will hardly be able to notice a different to the interface. Matt Cutts himself admits, “The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure.” Google is improving their product from the inside out.
Some are speculating that this update has something to do with the recent release of Bing.com from Microsoft. Perhaps it does, but you really have to give Google credit for staying focused on what it does best, being a search engine, and continuing to improve that first.
