The results of testing were somewhat mixed...
• Everyone pretty much agreed that the Caffeine infrastructure was faster than the original Google infrastructure, except for results that included Advanced Search queries, such as when you are using subtraction signs, quotes in query, etc. Mashable suggested that Google Caffeine actually doubled the speed of a Google search.
• Google Caffeine tends to show a larger data set for the number of search results for a particular search.
• The weighting of Video and Universal Search is scaled back in Caffeine.
• A slight value increase to exact match domain names.
• Google seems to be putting a little bit more emphasis on the age of a website.
• An increased weight for domain authority and tag pages on authority websites.
• A substantial increase in weight for social media websites. Currently FriendFeed seems to carry more weight than Twitter or FaceBook.
• Google Caffeine has shown a tendency to put more weight on keyword phrases or keyword strings, as opposed to singular keywords.
• Another major change, which is a reflection of how Google deals with breaking news stories, is that Google is willing to show the title and a description of a page, before it even caches the page in its index.
An interesting change in the Google Search Engine Results that I noted while doing the research for this article is that about half-way down the page, Google has added a real-time element to news items...
What they have done is to load a self-updating Iframe to the search results that shows updated news items on a topic as they become available. The image results are located just under this real-time news block. You can see it now, by doing a quick Google search for Barack Obama.
Also of interest about this real-time news window is that it is actually capturing some of its results from Twitter and other social media websites.
