Google's been secretly working on the new search infrastructure for more than six months.  The decision to go public on project caffeine now could well be in response to recent announcements from  Microsoft and Yahoo:  Having rebranded its live search service to bing.com this summer, Microsoft has since teamed up with Yahoo to create a united approach to search that actually could start to chip away at Google's dominance

The goal of the all new Google is to pioneer the next generation in search. In practice this means the search system will: crawl more pages; index pages faster; compute page reputation more accurately; and rank and return the most relevant pages as quickly as possible. Since all of these improvements are essentially "under the hood" it's unlikely that your customers and prospects will notice much when searching for the products or services you offer.  The real grey zone for marketing people like us right now is whether the established SEO tactics that have pushed us up the rankings so far, will falter and fail in the new improved version of the search engine.

By implication, more pages in the index mean more competition. In addition, Google's enhanced page reputation calculations will obviously impact search ranking too. These enhancements and others will boost relevance for searchers using the engine, which is great, but they are also likely to highlight any hidden kinks or cracks in a previously successful SEO strategy.

The good news is that working out how your business fares in the new improved Google is easy. Anyone who wants to try searching with the new model can visit the engine in BETA and try their business' most effective keywords out (click here to try searching with Google Caffeine or try the excellent Comparecaffeine.com to cross-check results easily on international and regional country versions of Google). The bad news is that the jury's still out on what kind of prep work we should all be undertaking as the switchover date approaches. The world's SEO experts know that an algorithmic tsunami is on its way, but there's no consensus on how to tackle it when it comes.

For now, if the future looks bright for anyone, it's likely to be the good old-fashioned webmasters who have been taking the moral high ground throughout. Google's new engine aims to reward those of us who believe good web practice means creating unique content, refreshing it regularly and supporting it with relevant well considered hyperlinks that point to highly complementary information elsewhere on the web.  In SEO speak these basics of good practice represent the first small steps towards highly effective organic search boosters like keyword to content continuity, deep link mapping or internal link augmentation.

What's unlikely to go unnoticed in the new improved Google engine are the, usually automated, tactics that have so far remained hidden under Google's radar.  Designed by SEO "experts" for the "quick fix, no questions asked" market, these software-based solutions can, for instance, instantly create thousands of links on "related" sites in an attempt to replicate the personal recommendation of real bloggers or webmasters. These dirty tricks and others like them are likely to become exposed and purged when the new Google gets going.

In terms of preparedness for the new engine's launch, recommendations across the SEO blogosphere still remain sketchy and advice can summarised in a just a few words: Evolving strategies suggest that boosting the social network aspects of your online presence (or - put simply -spending more time revising your company's Facebook page and LinkedIn profiles) and mastering the swiftly evolving tagged web are two "must consider" strategies for success. More refinements in the system's ability to understand related words or synonyms and map them to your chosen keywords will undoubtedly encourage more granularity in keyword choice and demand more frequent management and review.

It's early days still.  We'll keep you posted