Google - the world's favourite search engine - is changing. The question is will the real estate industry realise what it needs to do to take advantage?

The changes were announced earlier in the week here: Google. The changes appear to be quite fundamental and Google has explained its new engine, called "Caffeine", in the following way:

"Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks.......With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published."

So - Google has, with Caffeine, taken a major step forward in bringing more up-to-date content to the top of the pile of search results - giving its users a much more relevant experience.

What are the implications for the property industry?

I believe that it could benefit the bigger firms; both surveyors and property companies. Why? Well these are generally the organisations that have the budgets to spend on generating regular publicity. This in turn will become online content that will be available to Google to index. And as Caffeine will be looking for the latest content on the web - this should (if it's been optimised) be the content that begins to rank highest.

This is not to say that smaller firms and individual property professionals have to miss out - it just means that they will need to pay more attention to their online publicity and the regularity with which they update their website.

Sadly this is something that many firms do not do. So caffeine could mean that the big firms grow bigger at the expense of the smaller firms.

It's time to wake up and smell the caffeine.