With Microsoft's Bing doing pretty well out of the gate, taking a tiny sliver of Google's massive search engine market and the recent search deal with Microsoft and Yahoo, Google recently announced that it was doing its first complete overhaul of its search engine.

Google describes their work this way (via Mashable):

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.

You can try out the the beta version of the new Google search engine here. It is indeed much faster so far than the vanilla Google search and it seems to deliver slightly results, but this could just be a difference between what's been spidered and what hasn't. However, a slightly faster Google doesn't really impress me much. I like Google and never thought to myself "damn this is slow".