406 Not Acceptable

Google has released a beta of their new search engine algorithm: Caffeine. Many analysts see this new release as a direct reaction to the launch of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, which will soon be used by Yahoo.

The new algorithm looks to give Google a much-needed jolt by delivering more results, and better results. The engine seems better at removing, or not indexing, spam and hence shows more good Web sites. So there should be less instances where the top results for what you want are simply parked domains or the now ubiquitous price comparison site (how I hate those sites!)

A simple search for Toshiba 37″ in the current Google engine brings two comparison sites in the top 10, one in the number 1 position; however, on the new Caffeine engine no comparison sites appear in the top 10. For me that is progress. Often I will search for a product, to look for information on it before buying the item. The current engine is cluttered with these comparison sites, many of which are useless in the first place (often the cheapest seller has a fake price…) So I am happy this this change.

Other changes are much more subtle, typical searches keep the same site/page in the top rank and just shuffle the rest of the top 10 around. So whilst no-ones SEO looks like it is going to be shafted, the changes seem to be less dramatic than all the hype would suggest.

Today I realised how strong a hold caffeine has on me. I have gone cold turkey on the drug before, but I’ve never felt as bad as I have today.

After 10 am this morning the dreaded caffeine headache hit me, the aspirin could not hold it back! I felt horrible all day, I just needed a quick coffee… but I knew that would be giving up early.

By 2 pm I started to feel like I needed to go to sleep. That just shows how much caffeine has been propping me up these last few weeks!

The plight continues aided by a ton of caffeine free diet coke, hehe.

I am currently suffering from a nasty caffeine head-ache. I went home (after guzzling tons of tea, coffee, and coke to live through the evil last weeks of the term,) to find all the tea and coffee was caffeine free. Now I normally would have no problem with this, but after a ‘caffeine binge’ not touching the stuff will cause a nasty headache.

Trying to do an assessment with a banging head is not fun. Neither are the pains of three hours of football