Why all the buzz about Google Caffeine?

Business associate just showed me Google’s nascent Caffeine indexing system.

Well, okay, he didn’t show me the system; he just showed me the results.

If you care about the system more so than the results, there are better blogs for you.

I’ve been rudely hounding my suppliers for better local optimization. “Get,” I say, “my clients on the map.” I mean this literally. I got the idea from a couple of different sources:

1. Seems like whenever I search for something and there’s a geographic component to it, such as a store location, the most prominent feature on the result is this big map with seven chosen businesses listed to its right and digital thumbtacks showing me how far away from me these things are right now.
2. The same thing happens when my clients do searches. Go figure. And they say, “I’m no marketing expert but I think we need to be linked off that map.”

Thinking continues, then, that since I call myself a marketing expert and accept money from these people on that basis, it falls on me to get them featured on that map.

So there I sat with, let’s call him, “Michael,” since that’s his name, and I said…well, if you’ve read this far you know what I said. Telling you, I see the map in my sleep. My wife is sick of hearing about the stupid map.The next time I get us lost on a road trip, I really have it coming.

So Michael does a search for “Starbucks,” and you know what happened? The map was there, but you had to scroll down to see it. The links cascaded down the page in a way that just…made more sense…in, like, a holistic way. Er, dude. Can you dig it?

So, instead of the result showing me paid search on the top and right, a big honkin’ map and a link or two visible below the big honkin’ map, the information flowed like this, top to bottom of the page:

1. Paid
2. Wikipedia
3. News
4. Local (Map)
5. Organic/Social Media
6. Images

And the map was less honkin’ big.

It was groovy, man. It like, drew me in. This could be because it’s new, but the information flow just flat out made more sense.

I recalled when I first discovered TweetDeck. I told everyone it helped me “make sense” of Twitter. All the information I wanted from the system, compartmentalized in a functional fashion.

That’s what Caffeine is to Google search. We’ll drill down in to what it means in posts to come.

So my questions, y’all, are:

1. Is this why you people are using Bing? I tried Bing a couple of times but it was strange and different so I hid under the covers until it went away. Great TV spots, though. (“They’re waiting.” “Who’s waiting?”)
2. How will the rollout of Caffeine impact your SEO strategy?

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