Did you really expect Google to sit back and allow Bing to capture ANY of their market-share?  No, I didn't think so.

For some months now (I'd wager since around the time they first heard of the Bing project), Google has been looking at ways to move on to the next generation of search.

In a recent blog posting on the Webmaster central Blog, Google software engineers Sitaram Iyer and Matt Cutts describe a project (called Caffeine) which is intended to improve the accuracy, performance and relevance of Google searches.

Clearly there are issues in the 'search' environment which are somewhat outside the realm of users – performance and computing resources are obvious cases in point; in addition, there are issues of specific interest to the consumer – relevance of responses being an easy example.

Caffeine attempts to address both of these competing requirements.  As the authors write, "for the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

"Here's how to give us feedback: Do a search and look on the search results page for a link at the bottom of the page that says "Dissatisfied? Help us improve." Click on that link, type your feedback in the text box and then include the word caffeine somewhere in the text box. Thanks in advance for your feedback!"

Scanning the many comments to the blog entry, the overall response is that the search results are both more plentiful and more relevant.

Try it.  Better still, compare the results with other search engines (even though Iyer and Cutts ask you not to comment on that!).