Google Caffeine Real-Time, Fresh, Fast,

Matt Cutts discusses the new Caffeine Sandbox with Michael MacDonald at Search Engine Strategies Show in San Jose. Good stuff to pay attention to, since Cutts suggests that "power users" might notice differences in the rankings between the current default search and Caffeine.

Here's a suggestion I'd like to make for your testing if you do decide to check it out - play with the "Filter by Date" option in the left rail which appears on the current page if you click "options" on Google's current results page. For that matter, I'd like to suggest that many of the "options" may find their way into the standard results you get from that new SandBox.

I think they may have already released many of the tweaks in that recently released UI, but found few people using them in that form. So rather than requiring everyone to make choices (or maybe making some of the most "popular" choices already ranked from testing) the Caffeine option may represent choices made based on testing so far.

Now they want to see if you like those choices once they are baked into the default product. That's my take based on reviews and my own testing. Your mileage may vary and I may be way off base, but it's a good story.

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Video: Powerset Search Engine Beta Test

Powerset Demo Video from officialpowerset on Vimeo.

First thing I noticed is that the thing is down - I can't get any queries to load. Could be a bad day because Microsoft is rumored to be considering acquisition of Powerset and the news caused enough interest to overload their servers tonight. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt unless it continues to happen. Meanwhile, enjoy the video and give it a try yourself. I'd be interested in hearing comments on how it worked for you.

The blog post from nearly 4am this morning suggests that it was a late night at Powerset labs - and it appears they have a few more late nights overcoming whatever is causing the server response times that make me give up and go away. But that blog post also shows that they get marketing because they suggest that bloggers go look at their press coverage news page (which they mistakenly call a "Social Media News Release" - nope) and links to del.icio.us, Flickr, and a help page.

Actually, I just got it to load on a final test before giving up for the night. The results didn't impress for the searches I tried. They did suggest that I search for something that interests me. So I guess I didn't try something that can be found at Wikipedia or Freebase - which they are currently drawing on for the beta results. Now it's locking up again and not returning results. Well, looks promising if it starts working as advertised in that video. ;-)

Update, saw a twitter post from Powerset they had hit the pages of SlashDot and that was causing the overload. Well OK, I'll excuse the slow server times.