NewRedBook – The Nick Garner Blog

Caffeine is a new update from google and unlike the bluster of the Bing merger with yahoo, this is the first emergence of something that will probably change the world – and I don’t think im exaggerating…it will level the SEO playing field and let sites that have genuine merit rise up the rankings, overshooting the sites gamed by SEO’ers. This will mean better reach into better information and thus help the knowledge flow and so ‘change the world’

In essence it’s a massive new infrastructural update of the Google search algo that allows it to work more efficiently and faster. This means they are paving the way for a far more comprehensive search algo. In short (IMO) its the death knell of SEO and the emergence of social engineering as the best way to get ranked.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/08/help-test-some-next-generation.html

“Based on the blog post, we can guess that this new infrastructure may include ways of crawling the web more comprehensively, determining reputation and authority (possibly beyond the link graph and what’s typically thought of as PageRank), and returning more relevant results more quickly, although Google’s Matt Cutts told me that the changes are “primarily in how we index”.
http://searchengineland.com/caffeine-googles-new-search-index-23823

Powerful stuff.