Google Pours a Cup of Caffeine
Google (GOOG) unveiled Caffeine Tuesday evening, aiming to give its Web indexing and link delivery system a jolt of speed in finding new pages as well as delivering the most current version of existing pages.
With its new indexing system, Google anticipates a 50% improvement in delivering the most current version of information posted on Web pages, Google says on a blog post. That should bode well for Google as its seeks to keep its lead intact over Yahoo (YHOO) and a new search entrant, Microsoft's (MSFT) Bing.
Caffeine's indexing system works by analyzing the entire Web in small portions and updating Google's search index on a continuous, global basis. Under its old indexing system, Google would scour the entire Web and update its search index every couple of weeks, while some portions would be refreshed faster.
Google says it launched its new indexing system for two reasons:
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.
Whether these changes to its search indexing system will create a cascading affect on the way search engine optimization (SEO) is handled has yet to be seen.
