Carrie Grimes, one of Google’s brilliant software engineers, announced late in the day on Tuesday that Google has officially rolled out its much anticipated new search index coined “Caffeine.”
It promises “50% fresher results for web searches” and is the “largest collection of web content [they’ve] offered” to date.
In her blog post, Grimes explains that due to the rapidly expanding nature of web content, including videos, images, news and real-time updates, “the average web page is richer and more complex.” As a result the old way of indexing was no longer effective. “Searchers want to find the latest relevant content,” says Grimes, “and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.” So “to keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations” the company developed “Caffeine.”
“Caffeine” is the indexing system that “analyzes the web in small portions” in order to update the search index “on a continuous basis globally.” That means searchers will find “fresher information than ever before – no matter where or when it was published.”
The rate at which “Caffeine” indexes web pages is really quite astounding: “if this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles tall every second.” New information is added at a rate of “hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day.” The amount of information the new search index stores, Grimes illustrates, “would need 625,000 of the largest iPods” that would “go for more than 40 miles” if stacked from end-to-end.
More and more people every day around the world turn to the internet to search for what they need. With “Caffeine” Google has made that search more effective and more relevant. Website owners hopeful of getting ranked will also need to keep their web content fresh and updated to maintain the attention of their target audience groups and “Caffeine.”
So grab a coffee and get moving!
In the meantime, if you’ve ever wondered, when you search on Google you’re not searching the “live” web. You’re actually querying the content Google has already indexed. Following is a great explanation of how it all works…
wow this is a great news