Just the other day, Jonathan Strickland wrote about Google’s Caffeine, and if you missed it, the American search giant is trying to redefine the way it crawls the Web, indexes pages and ranks search results. As Jonathan pointed out, some think that Caffeine is a response to Microsoft Bing, but even as fast as Google moves, it still couldn’t rush a brand new search system to market that quickly. I mean, it was no secret that Microsoft was working to replace Live Search, but similarities between the two systems are likely to be fairly coincidental, unless there was some serious leaking of proprietary information going on.

But why would Google have been working on a new way to rank pages in search? Google’s lead may seem commanding — 65 percent to a combined 28 percent for Yahoo and Microsoft, as The New York Times’ Miguel Helft pointed out — but that’s not the whole story.