Google Caffeine

June 2010 represents a significant moment in the online world. Google, the worlds largest search engine, has announced the completion of its new indexing system called Caffeine.

Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches that the last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content offered by any search engine. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you’ll be able to find links to relevant content much sooner after it has been published than ever before, which is fantastic for website owners!

For a demonstration on how Google actually works (including how it decides which pages it shows first in its results), take a look at this video http://www.google.com/howgoogleworks/

So what is the reason for building this new indexing system? Well, put simply, content on the web is growing. Not just in size and numbers, but due to video, images, news and real-time updates the average modern web page is richer and more complex. As a result, people’s expectations from search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find what they are looking for quickly and publishers want their content to be found the instant they publish it.

To keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet the expectations of it users, Google built Caffeine.

The old index that Google used was built up of several layers. Several of these layers were refreshed at a faster rate than others; with the main layer getting updated every two weeks. This was done by analysing the whole web, causing a significant delay between the time it took to find a page and make it available to the search world.

The new Caffeine index allows Google to analyse the web in smaller portions and update the search index on a more frequent basis. As new pages are found, or indeed new information on existing pages, then these can be added straight to the index, meaning you can find fresher information quicker than ever before!

Caffeine now allows Google to index web pages on a massive scale; every second, Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages. If you imagine this as a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second!!

This fabulous new index is also built with the future in mind.

Google software engineer Carrie Grimes explains; “Not only is it much fresher, it’s a robust foundation that makes it possible to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results to you.”

There are more updates to come from Google in the coming months and we’ll keep you posted as we hear of them!