Google has a giant target on its back. Microsoft has been on a spending and deal-making spree to grow Bing, recently signing a huge search deal with Yahoo. And with Bing starting to steal some market share from Google, it’s proving to be a formidable opponent. Oh, and now you can’t count out Facebook either, which justlaunched a new realtime search engine.

Google’s not taking any of this lying down. Secretly, they’ve been working on a new project: the next generation of Google Search. This isn’t just some minor upgrade, but an entire new infrastructure for the world’s largest search engine. In other words: it’s a new version of Google.

The project’s still under construction, but Google’s now confident enough in the new version of its search engine that it has released the development version for public consumption. While you won’t see too many differences immediately, let us assure you: it’s a completely upgraded Google search.

Google specifically states that its goal for the new version of Google Search is to improve its indexing speed, accuracy, size, and comprehensiveness. Here’s what they wrote:

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search. It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we’re opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.”

This search is not only faster, but in some instances in our few tests, seems more capable of producing real-time results. It’s still way too early to make any definitive conclusions about this new search, but we will test it out thoroughly and give you a full report soon. In the meantime,try it out for yourself and tell us what you think.