It seems as if the search wars are heating up yet again.

On Monday, Facebook announced that it was acquiring Friendfeed, which offers the ability to search for social networking listings from friends and non-friends. Some think it could help Facebook develop its own full-blown search engine, perhaps to compete with Google.

In the meantime, Google isn't sitting still. On Tuesday, the search giant announced "Caffeine," a new backend for Web searching that's now available for public testing. The new site, www2.sandbox.google.com, is billed as a major code update for Google's searches.

Users won't notice any difference in the look and feel of the site compared to the regular Google site, but Google search engineer Matt Cutts said on his blog, www.mattcutts.com/blog/caffeine-update/, that the "update is primarily under the hood: we're rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure."

Users might notice slightly faster searches or different results, but based on my testing, it's not all that much to write home about so far. I didn't notice significantly faster results, but on a fast machine with a fast broadband connection, Google is already almost instantaneous.

I did, however, notice slightly different rankings when searching on Caffeine versus the old Google. For example, when I searched Google for "Internet safety," my own SafeKids.com came out as the ninth listing; with Caffeine, it came out in seventh place.

When I searched "online safety" on Google, my site came out No. 10 but it was the fourth result on Caffeine.

Obviously I'm quite happy with these results because it elevated my rankings which — in theory — means more traffic. However, it also meant someone else's site had to move down. For businesses, a change in rankings can have an enormous financial impact.

A search on Google for "air travel" brings up Travelocity in second place, Orbitz in third, and cheapoair.com in fourth. On Caffeine, cheapoair.com came in second, Travelocity came in fifth and Orbitz in sixth place.

Coming in the top two can have an enormous impact on the amount of traffic and ultimately how much money the site earns.

Google says that the revamped search engine has nothing to do with the recently announced deal between Microsoft and Yahoo that makes Microsoft's Bing the new search engine for Yahoo. While that may be true, I'm sure that Google's management is concerned about a possible loss of market share after its two biggest competitors agree to work together.

Even though Bing is graphically more interesting and complex than Google, it was smart for Google not to change its user interface. People go to a search engine Web site for information, not to find pleasing art work or to be entertained. Unless the changes in the Google search become less subtle, Caffeine could simply be viewed as part of Google's ongoing efforts to improve its underlying code.

Larry Magid's technology column appears Wednesdays in the Daily News. E-mail can be sent to larry@larrymagid.com.