2009 saw much advancement in the world of web design; from the launch of Microsoft’s Bing and localized search to Twitter and the social media explosion. However, not one of these innovations has prompted the widespread speculation and industry coverage as Google’s new ‘hero product’ Caffeine.

Sure, anybody who works in web design, online advertising or any incarnation of SEO, is used to the hegemonic control Google has on the online space, yet, when Matt Cutts announced that Google caffeine will rolled out across all data centers at the beginning of 2010, the digital world took a collective deep breath as we waiting to see what impact this would have on our SEO rankings and web design performance.

So what is Caffeine and what will it mean for your website and SEO? Well, ultimately it was devised with the objective of getting on step further to real time search and results will now combine tweets, facebook status and blog posts in all first page listings.

But what does it mean for the world of online marketing? Like all Google changes we will just have to wait and see . . .