Google Builds ‘Caffeine’ for 50 Percent Fresher Search Results

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Google has ramped up the speed with which it’s able to return new web content with “a new web indexing system called Caffeine,” according to a recent company blog post.

Google is promising “50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index,” which would basically re-scour the web continuously, a process that took a couple weeks each go-around to add new sites to the base level search results. If you’ve ever built a web site from scratch, for instance, you’ll have noticed that there’s a bit of a lag between when it goes live and when it shows up in Google’s main index.

Says Google:

“Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.

With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.”

Will most web surfers really notice anything drastically different? Probably not right away but Google says that Caffeine has been built “with the future in mind,” the ultimate goal being “an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online.”

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