Legal Research

Google announced this week that it is testing a new search engine, code named "Caffeine."  According to media reports, the new search engine is supposed to include changes to indexing, ranking, and crawling, although Google is being a bit coy and has yet to spell out the changes in detail.  In Google's words, Caffeine is designed to "push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions."  And that means what exactly?!!? 

A quick glimpse at the new page shows no user interface changes, and given Google's success with its clean and simple page, I would have been shocked if it messed with the user interface.  I did a quick comparison of Caffeine and the standard Google search engine, searching with the following query:  "climate change" impact human migration

Caffeine and regular old Google gave me similar search results, but regular old Google gave me links to scholarly articles first:

However, Caffeine did not highlight Google Scholar results for me at the top of the search result page:

Since I like the way regular old Google highlights Google Scholar material for me, I'll stick with it for now.  For techie reviews of Caffeine and more search result comparisons, check out these posts by Vanessa Fox and Mary Jo Foley.