Google Caffeine: Ground-breaking news or retaliation?

Google's new search engine version, Caffeine, was announced on the Google Webmaster Tools blog on Monday and has left a lot of SEO'ers and webmasters left scratching their heads.

In their explanation of the new Google Caffeine project, Google offered the following explanation:
 
"It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions."

So, it indexes faster (which is likely a response to Facebook's new real-time search feature, which was a response to Twitter's real-time search capabilities) and is more accurate, but how does this relate to the SEO world?

Mashable's Google Caffeine test drive produced the following prediction:

"SEO professionals, your job just got a lot harder. The algorithm’s definitely different. It has more reliance on keyword strings to produce better results."

A computerworld.com even went so far as to say that "Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialists are going to have to go on a whole new formula for getting their clients to the top...and who knows exactly how this new Google search algorithm works?"

As SEO professionals, we have seen "major changes" announced at Google before, but the overall algorithm always stayed predominately the same. As veterans in the industry, we are pretty certain that no matter what changes Google announces in response to major developments (like Microsoft taking over Yahoo!), they will still continue to rank sites with

• Unique, relevant, and informative content
• Optimized page titles, content, and other on-page attributes
• Relevant and authority inbound links

higher than those without them.

So we have to ask ourselves: Is this actually a legitimate announcement, or is Google just making sure we don't forget about them?

To try out Google's new Caffeine search engine, visit their demo version here.