What is Google Caffeine?

What is the significance of Caffeine for showing innovation in search at Google?

• http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html. This is a follow-up question to .

• Answer:

  Caffeine is still pretty new, so it's hard to know what it's impact will be, but I think it's shows a commitment to innovation. Right now Google dominates the search market and that probably won't change in the next few years. However, Google clearly realizes that Facebook and Twitter may threaten their search business at some point as social sharing becomes more and more pervasive. I believe that Caffeine is a preemptive move on Google's part to stay ahead of social sites with better real-time search. The reason I think this shows that Google is committed to innovation is because they really don't need to worry about real-time results yet. When most companies have such a clear dominance over a market, they do everything they can to slow down change so that no one else can compete (think Microsoft, Blockbuster, etc). Google realizes that traditional search won't be around forever, so they're updating their product to prepare for a battle that probably won't happen for another five years. I'm not saying Google will win the battle (or that Caffeine will matter), but I think they deserve credit for aggressively updating their product despite the fact that they don't need to (yet).