Wed 9th of June, filed under SEO
Google has finally rolled out Caffeine, a brand new version of its web indexing system. Announced just under a year ago, the arrival of the new system has been highly anticipated and is designed to generally improve the speed and relevance of search results by utilising a more comprehensive, and continuously updated, index.
Officially announced on the Google blog, Caffeine is now live and demonstrates a complete change to the infrastructure of the search engine. Where the previous index was constructed of layers which would update at different times, with each update requiring a full scan of the entire web, Caffeine analyses the web in smaller sections and is therefore capable of updating its servers continuously.
Google’s hope for the new system is to provide users with fresh and relevant content by using Caffeine to index web pages on a much grander scale than ever before.
"Every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel," writes Google’s Software Engineer, Carrie Grimes on the Official Google Blog.
"In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second."
"People's expectations for search are higher than they used to be."
Google’s official reason for updating the system is because of a need to ‘keep up with the evolution of the web’; Grimes explains that not only to people want to be provided with completely fresh content but those creating the content want it to be visible immediately.
The arrival of Caffeine has sparked rumours, however, that Google is improving its service to keep up with the ever-growing competition from Microsoft's platform Bing. The recent growth in popularity of the 'decision engine' and the new partnership between Microsoft and Yahoo are speculated to be part of the reason Google is seeking to enhance its system.
Posted by Carli Harris
