Google has finally rolled out its long awaited Search engine index update that they have called Caffeine. Google started testing Caffeine in August 2009 asking developers and businesses for feedback by deploying the new structure at a separate web address. After 9 months of long wait, Google finally raised the curtain.
With the launch of new search index, Google is promising 50 percent fresher results and the largest collection of Web content.
As published on the Google Official Blog, content on the web is blossoming. It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.
What was missing in the old system?
Google’s old index had several layers some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer updated after a gap of some weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, Google’s crawlers used to analyze the entire web, which meant that there was a significant delay between when any page was found and made it available online in the searches.
Features of Google Caffeine
With Caffeine, Google will analyse the web in small portions and update the search index on a continous basis rather than weekly. As and when new information will be found splashed over the internet, it will be added to the existing index. This means that you will be able to find fresher information in the searches than ever before.
Some of the main features rolled out as a part of Caffeine are:
- Caffeine can process hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel.
- Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database.
- It makes the Google an even faster and comprehensive search engine.
Now, the memory that Google is talking about here, you would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles as Carrie Grimes, Software Engineer with Google mentioned in the post.
Caffeine is definitely built keeping the future in mind when we all are striving for the latest information without any delay. Google Caffeine is live now. There is no change in the front-end but as they mention on the Google Blog, the entire backend architecture has changed.
Try your hands-on on the latest marvel from Google in the form of Caffeine and share your experiences about the changes that you notice in the search results and the Google Search Engine Rankings.
