Google has lifted the lid on a new version of its search engine, allowing users to look at the results it will generate.

The new engine, available at a separate address, looks the same as the current one but ranks results differently, which could affect businesses who rely on Google results to drive traffic.For the past few months, the company's search team has been busily working on just that, with a project called "Caffeine."

The company finally removed the shroud from Caffeine today with a blog post titled "Help Test Some Next-Generation Infrastructure," an open invite for Web developers to check out Google's "top secret project." The infrastructure improvements, Google points out, will largely go unnoticed by the Web searching populace. Web developers, however, "might notice a few differences."

In the posting, Google Inc. says the new engine, code-named "Caffeine," will be faster, more accurate and more comprehensive.

The public testing of the new engine comes two weeks after Microsoft Corp. struck a deal to replace Yahoo Inc.'s search engine, with its own Google competitor, called Bing. Yahoo Search and Bing are the second and third most popular engines after Google.

Try it out at:

http://www2.sandbox.google.com/