For some time, the developers at Google were working at a solution to make their search engine faster. Now you can test the new search architecture called “Caffeine” yourself.

Obviously, they reached their goal of increasing the search speed, but didn’t change the search behavior. When searching for normal terms, you can feel a speed increase of up to 75% in my tests, but when using more complex searches with quotes, there is almost no difference.

You can test the new Caffeine search here: http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

Some speed tests:

As you can see, when using quotes, the difference is not that big.

UPDATE: With Chrome 4.0, there are official extensions and a better ad-blocking plugin available! Please check out the AdThwart extension to block advertisements in Google Chrome!

Adblock scripts for Firefox, Opera and even Internet Explorer have been around for a while, but until now, there was no easy-to-install extension for Google Chrome with a similar  functionality. The latest release of Google Chrome, version 3, has added easy support for extensions, and a nice guy called gg3po has developed an extension to disable advertisements on websites.

Here is how to activate that extension:

• Step 1: Prepare Google Chrome
  First of all, download Google Chrome Channel Changer (alternative download), launch it and set the mode to Dev. Then click Update to save the settings.
  
• Step 2: Update Google Chrome
  In Chrome, click on the settings button (on the right side) and select About Google Chrome. The appearing window will check for updates and download them, if available. After the download finished, close Chrome.
  
• Step 3: Enable extensions
  Now right-click on your Chrome shortcut, select Properties. Add “–enable-extensions” (without the quotes) as launch parameter to your Target path.
  
• Step 4: Download AdSweep
  Launch Chrome, now extensions should be enabled (although you won’t see any change yet). Go to http://www.adsweep.org/ and download the Extension for Chrome (not the User Script!) (alternative download). A window will pop up asking you whether to install the extension, click OK.
  
• Step 5: Restart Chrome & start surfing ad-free!
  Now most ads on websites shouldn’t show up any more!

This is how a website looked before and after enabling the AdSweep extension: