Google Caffeine

Written on the 16 June 2010

Google has launched a new, upgraded version of its search engine: Google Caffeine. Caffeine promises to improve the speed, accuracy, size and comprehensiveness of Google search. It provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than their last search index and it is apparently the largest collection of web content that Google has offered. So whether it is a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.

Google Caffeine was built to keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations. Its 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 (hence the importance to ensure your website content is changing regularly, otherwise you wont appear high in the results).

To give you a bit more background, when you search Google you are not searching the live web. Instead you are searching Google's index of the web which, like the list in the back of the book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need.

Google's old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others. To refresh a layer of the old index, Google had to analyse the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when they found a page and made it available to you. With Caffeine, Google analyse the web in small portions and update their search index on a continuous basis, globally. As Google find pages , or new information on existing pages, they can add these straight to the index. This means you are able to find fresher information than ever before – no matter when or where it was published.

The new Google will only get better as features are implemented and developed. The end result is a better search experience for the user. To read more on Google Caffeine click here.