Google on Tuesday unveiled a new web indexing system that promises 50 percent faster search results. Dubbed Caffeine, the new index will also offer the largest collection of web content Google has ever offered.
Here’s a little search engine 101: When you conduct a search you aren’t actually searching the live web. You are searching an index of the web. It’s sort of like the list in the back of a book that points to the specific information you are looking for.
Google software engineer Carrie Grimes said Google is launching Caffeine to keep up with the evolution of the web and to meet rising user expectations. In a nutshell, Google is promising its users will find news stories, blogs, forum posts, and other relevant content sooner after it’s published with Caffeine.
“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 web page is richer and more complex,” she said. “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.”
Continually Refreshing Content
Google’s old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others. For example, the main layer would update every couple of weeks. In order to refresh a layer of the old index, Google had to analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when Google found a page and made it available to searchers.
“With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis globally,” Grimes said. “As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to…