Well according to Google, it may not happen for months. But Matt Cutts said it would happen after the holidays. Maybe he was talking about after Easter?

Last August Google first announced Caffeine. And they also set up a developer sandbox for user feedback
www2.sandbox.google.com but now it seems as though they don’t want people to know which IP points to the Caffeine data centre.

There has been talk of caffeine since August 2009. For those of you unaware of caffeine, it is an upgraded and new version of the Google search engine.

Matt Cutts described caffeine as:
“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

So after all the hype what is going on?
Google seems to be doing a lot of tests, perhaps they have found more issues than they are happy with before they want to announce caffeine is live.

According to Search Engine Land they get emails from people saying they think Caffeine is live. But Google says Caffeine isn’t live on Google.com — it’s still only at one data center, not much seems to have changed from last November when Matt Cutts said Caffeine was available at this IP address: 209.85.225.103.

Maybe Google have seen how many faults they have had with Google Buzz and are really trying not to let out a new product without fully testing it. If they wait any longer I am sure the other search engines will be releasing their own version of caffeine, they may call it coffee.

Photo is from flickr