What does the Google Countdown means?

I was dumbfounded upon seeing it. And the first thing I did was to get a calculator and try computing what do these numbers lead to. By calculating the given number on Google’s homepage, the numbers suggest 19.44875 days as of this writing. That day will fall on the 1st day of January (New Year’s Day) 2010.

We did a little research and found out that Techcrunch was among the first to try to give its ‘theory’ about this peculiar Google countdown.

What happens in 20 days? It could be the end of the world, when Google becomes self-aware, or 2010. You decide.

Don’t worry, it’s a joke. Of course it is! Google is keeping mums about this countdown. Even its official blog nor Matt Cutts’ personal blog don’t have information to explain this ‘phenomenon’.

In our honest opinion, we remember Matt Cutts revealing that Google Caffeine – new Google search engine architecture – will be up and live by the end of the holidays. As a matter of fact, several googlers are testing it on a single data center right now.

This is a logical reason we could think off for this countdown. Nevertheless, we are still waiting for Google’s official explanation about it. Stay tune for more updates and don’t be scared. This is probably one of Google’s “scare tactics”.

The news was documented on Google’s Official Blog. In order to provide better search engine result pages to its users, Google is extending the Personalized Search feature previously used by users ‘signed-in’ to their Google Accounts. There are several blogs claiming that the change was “Permanent” so it seems Big G has already applied the new feature on its ‘almighty’ search engine.

You could view this report on Google’s blog or you could view the video excerpt below from Google engineers explaining the extended personalized search.

In simplest terms, with personalized search, it would be harder for so-called SEO experts and newbie bloggers to be on top of Google’s SERPs. When a user enters a particular keyword say “Mobile Phones”, Google will show pages based on the user’s browsing activity in past. Thus, even if your site is ‘optimized’ for that  particular keyword you’re not assured that you’ll rank well in Google SERPs.

However, this whole idea could possibly be altered. In the past, Google pointed out that signed-in users can delete/disable this search customization from their account. The same goes for “signed-out” users (users who don’t have Google accounts). Google offers them an option to delete the “anonymous” cookie in their browsers to disable this option. The question is: Who would bother to do that? Perhaps only a few individuals but normally people don’t care about the search results coming out of their screen as long as they can get the information they want.

We don’t have enough information to conclude yet if this move was part of Google’s new search engine architecture – caffeine. Matt Cutts shared some new features of caffeine which will be tested in a data center before the holidays before it will be deployed in full by January 2010.

Finally, the best solution most bloggers recommend is to think of other ways to increase traffic to your blogs/sites and not to depend solely on search engines as a way to drive visitors. We agree.

For more information about Google’s new policy on personalized search you may visit these links:

Personalized search for everone

More details on personalized search

How Google customize results

How to turn off personalization

Matt Cutts was again interviewed by WebProNews. Cutts had revealed more details on caffeine and the changes Google made on the architecture of its revised search engine. Those were really great and we’re excited as well to hear that. But one thing that is really bugging several blogs and website owners is when Cutts said “Google is considering the website’s speed (less loading time) as one of the factors to affect its (website) rankings”.

..We’re starting to think more and more about “should speed be a factor in google’s rankings?”. Because, even in adwords if your site is slow that could be a factor how much you have to pay (in adwords). Historically, we haven’t use that in our search rankings, but a lot of people in Google thinks that the web should be fast, it should be a good experience; so it’s fair to say that if you’re a fast site maybe you should get a little of a bonus (higher rank)…

You may want to listen to the whole interview. Here it is.

Most of the tools Matt Cutts revealed were widely used. Personally, I wasn’t entirely ‘thrilled’ using them. We’ll get to that in a moment. The main topic to discuss here is Google’s plan to include the website’s Speed as a factor to decide if it should rank well or not. It sounds bias and discriminating to several blog and website owners, especially newbies.

Big “Joe” website will dominate in Google

Of course, if you want a faster website you need more powerful hosting provider which will drive your expenditures high. Typical webmasters avail medium scale hosting services after consideration of their capital and revenues. Most probably they will not be able to buy expensive dedicated servers or higher hosting services. On the other hand, big websites don’t have problems implementing this. They have the capital/money to buy expensive and powerful hosting providers to beef up their site’s performance and decrease loading time.

Matt Cutts earlier revealed about tools to optimize your javascripts and online sites to monitor your site’s loading time. I told you I wasn’t excited using it for the reason that those are mere “indicators” and they can’t tell more details about your site. I used a similar web page analysis tool from Yahoo! called YSlow, and it’s a similar add-on with Firebug on Firefox. I ran it and got frustrated with the results not only because my site’s score was terrible but also my website was only a month old!

I ran another site(with alexa rating of 20K) and was “visually” running faster than mine. The results were almost “the same” in YSlow. I concluded that these tools only give you hints what your site’s performance is. Also, don’t believe 100% that by merely “optimizing” your javascripts and removing “junks” in your website you’ll notice significant difference in loading time. Those were crappy theories, what you need is a better, more powerful and obviously more expensive hosting provider.

Big sites don’t always have great content

Not all big website owners are big advocates of delivering excellent info and articles to their visitors. Some do, but several cares only about “money”. They can afford excellent web hosting services because they have the money to spend. Where do they get the funding? From their online business of course.

Mediocre business owners and websites may get wipe-out and out of business because of this policy. The average bloggers might not have the chance to be discovered. But, who cares?

Wrap up

Anyhow, Google always reap the rewards if speed will or will not become a factor on being rank high in SERP. Billions of internet users are using the web everyday and Big G has a large chunk of the share. We’re all at the mercy of Google, even if 1 million blog owners protest we really can’t do anything if Google decide this should be the way.

But don’t lose hope, as Matt Cutts said “We’re thinking”, this could be a hint that Google might consider not to implement this or find a way to make Google rankings a level playing field to all (cross your fingers).

Google Engineer Matt Cutts has revealed on his blog that Google is planning to release the new and improved version of its search engine system, ‘Google Caffeine’ or ‘Caffeine’ after the Holidays. If you remember, the Google Caffeine sandbox was introduced last August 2009 in order for webmasters and power searchers to try Google caffeine and give feedback on the system.

I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays. Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. said Matt Cutts.

You can read more about Google caffeine on its blog. Big G’s goal on introducing caffeine can be summarized on 3 aspects:

1. Better crawl and search of data
2. Better indexing of web pages
3. Faster performance

According to this interview, Matt Cutts described Caffeine as “re-writing of Google’s index system”. The key changes are efficiency in searching, more real time searching and faster delivery of searches. In general, people who tried Google caffeine on sandbox expressed positive reviews.

At this time, caffeine developer sandbox is down, Cutts answered that once the data center is up, IP address of the new caffeine sandbox will be given.