There is still a lack of awareness amongst many CEOs and marketing people about the rollout of Google Caffeine. Google upgrades its infrastructure periodically (there is speculation that it happens every 3 years or so) and Caffeine is the name that has been given to the latest upgrade.

Within the relevant circles there have been a lot of rumour and speculation about the project- and in August Google invited feedback as it tested the system.  There have been mixed, inconsistent reports on when/ how this upgrade would take place (i.e. that Google innitially tested this on a couple of datacentres), and to date Google still have not officially announced Caffine rollout- although Google staff will refer to Caffeine on their webmaster support forums.

At Pixel Lab we noticed at the start of November that pages suddenly started being indexed very quickly. Blog posts that we were administering for clients were suddenly showing on page 1 of google.co.uk within hours (prior to this it had taken weeks). Since then this has consistently been the case and Google Caffeine-related changes have been in effect. Listening to talk from other Search Engine professionals- they've been freaking out as carefully-cultivated Search Engine Rankings shifted and a sea change took place.

Google have made changes to their algorithm that ensures that original, good quality opinion-piece type content is indexed and ranked quickly. They have moved another step towards filtering out old school practices like keyword stuffing and recognising and rewarding the type of content that people will be interested in. We are not quite seeing real time search (and this would be difficult to implement and protect against spam) but search engine rankings are a lot more dynamic.

Numerous sources on the web indicate that Caffeine is faster, more accurate and more tuned into the type of results that people are likely to want.

To what does this mean for businesses? There's been a lot of talk about this. To put it simply, companies need to up their game in terms of how they communicate with audiences. Static websites are becoming less relevant and topical meaningful communication with stakeholders is becoming increasingly important.  The opportunity presented to companies to embrace and use new platforms and occupy the online space and connect with customers at key points continues to improve.