It’s already clear to me that parts of the update are already being put out there by Google.  They do not want a repeat of the much Famed Florida update to search results.  So little by little Caffeine will be tossed in as incremental updates to the search formula.

But what is going to count to google to produce search results that are relevant to the user? Google has already indicated that it is going to try to go with more real time relevant results.  OK, what does that mean?  Google is going to look to see what is most active on the net for various terms, Google says it wants to crawl and index more of the net more frequently.  OK, so their bots are gonna be more active and looking for information from where?  Google indicates it is going to be watching the social networking items out there.  Things like Twitter, Myspace, Facebook and other social networking tools.  So what does this mean to the average retailer of a product or service who is ranking for a search term? Not much in my mind.  Unless your position changes regularly because one of your terms happens to make it into the news or gets tweeted about for some reason.  For a site like say my Gourmet Coffee site where my search terms are coffee related I do not think that Caffeine is going to make much of a day by day lasting impression.  However at moments when other coffee companies make a major move and happen to get tweeted alot it could change results temporarily.

My thoughts are that for most peoples positions you may see some minor shifts, either up or down depending on the changes made to the search results.  I do not think your suddenly going to find yourself rocket to the top or drop off google if your already ranking well for terms and getting traffic through those terms.

Sparky