Google makes big leap in search index with "Caffeine"

By Richi Jennings. June 10, 2010.

Google has launched it's new index, dubbed Caffeine. It promises faster updates, faster searches, and expandability to match the growth of the Web. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers watch Google stick to the knitting.

Your humble blogwatcher selected these bloggy morsels for your enjoyment. Not to mention Street Fighter FAQ...
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Charles Arthur drinks deep from the cup:

Basically, Google is linking into real-time feeds: those from Twitter ... and now also from blogs, such as Wordpress, which have implemented real-time ... RSS feeds known as RSSCloud. ... The web index isn't now stratified; Google updates chunks of it all the time.
...
It's interesting to see that Google is focussing again on ... search. That's what made its name, but it's clear that ... Bing ... has got Google thinking about how it can improve. ... It's quicker, and it does, or possibly doesn't, have some effect on the black arts of SEO. Watch for ... [optimisers] mumbling for the next few weeks about how Caffeine has completely upset their rankings and careful work - even while Google protests that it's changed nothing at all.

Brier Dudley had a fortuitous meeting:

Google search guru Matt Cutts just happened to be in Seattle. ... "Fundamentally the change is as soon as a document gets crawled boom, it gets indexed," Cutts said ... rather than updating the index in a staggered process. "This essentially makes the entire index closer to real time."
...
He compared the change to going from a bus to a limo.

Camille Ricketts enumerates the challenges:

The number of indexed images, videos, news articles, tweets, and social network status updates is exploding. ... The trend toward real time information has also presented a problem. ... Twitter and Facebook especially are speeding up people’s conceptions of the web. ... Caffeine breaks this task into bite-size pieces. Instead of analyzing vast swaths of the internet with every update, it continuously looks at much smaller portions, re-indexing content along the way.
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It’s now capable of adding hundreds of thousands of pages into the Google index per second, and hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of information per day.

Andrew Goodman foresees "exciting times":

In SEO, it’s always important to be able to read the tea leaves. ... Major algorithmic evolution, and major volatility in search rankings awaits: no doubt to the benefit of companies who understand how to marry timeless elements with freshness, vibrancy, and sociability.
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[This] will spur the development of a range of new third-party tools and agency services. Perhaps most importantly, though, corporate cultures ... will have to evolve from within. Means of providing freshness, vibrancy, and original content will have to be developed. ... In other cases, by changing how you think.

But Vanessa Fox is stoic:

Content owners will reap the benefits of Caffeine without doing anything at all. In fact, there’s really not much, if anything content owners can do. ... This change doesn’t make any of the crawling, indexing, or ranking factors more or less important than before. It simply makes crawled content available in search results more quickly before and paves the way for added flexibility in taking advantage of the whatever may come as the web evolves.

And Finally...
Street Fighter Background Character FAQ
[hat tip: capcom-unity.com]
 
 
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Richi Jennings is an independent analyst/consultant, specializing in blogging, email, and security. A cross-functional IT geek since 1985, you can follow him as @richi on Twitter, pretend to be richij's friend on Facebook, or just use good old email: itbw@richij.com.

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