Every now and the folks at Google put on their overalls and start messing around under the hood. They’ve been at it again recently, and sometime in the next couple of months we can expect the new, supercharged Google Caffeine.

These Google tweaks generally result in changes in search engine rankings. Sometimes significant changes! Will Google Caffeine change your search rankings? They’re giving you the chance to test it out.

You can test out the new Google Caffeine here. And if you’re impatient, you can see the results side by side with the with this Google Comparison Tool.

And here is a basic FAQ page.

Google is looking for feedback, so if you go to this invitation page you can tell them what you think and see what others are saying.

In typical Google fashion, they’re not revealing anything about what they’re actually changing. However here are some of the common observations we’ve gathered from various forums and blogs:

• Google Caffeine is crawling a lot more pages to get results — including pages that aren’t supposed to be crawled. So it’s returning far more results for each query.
• Google Caffeine favors fresh content. It seems to be refreshing its content much faster, so, for example, the results for breaking news stories are getting updated in real time. Updating your pages often is going to become a priority.
• Testers are saying the results are more relevant, with fewer spammy sites at the top.

Try it yourself and see if there’s any difference to your search results… then let us know by posting a comment.

In a recent survey MarketingSherpa found a 50-50 split in the way people like to navigate around a site. Half like menus, half prefer search.

It depends somewhat on the type of product. Shoppers who want to compare what’s available will tend to use menus to find the category of product they’re looking for. Those who know what product they’re looking for like to just type it into a search box and go directly to it.

We asked our in-house programming guru what he would recommend as a tool to search the content of small-business websites and he suggested Google Custom Search, which creates “a customized search experience for your own website.”

You can find it at http://www.google.com/coop/cse. And of course, being Google, it’s free. So you can have all that sophisticated search functionality your potential customers are looking for… and they’ll stick around longer.