Google’s new index called “Caffeine” has been in the works for quite sometime, but it finally launched on June 8th, 2010. If it does what it says it will, then it may change search in 2010 and beyond as we know it.
Rarely do focus my attention on newsworthy items or breaking any kind of news when writing this blog. I normally just take those items in consideration while try to teach people how to utilize SEO techniques on those sites. That is, unless something big happens, then I turned into your standard 1940′s newsman on the beat.
Although I’m far from breaking any sort of news (3 days late), I do think that it is very important to bring Google’s Updated Search Indexing system entitled “Caffeine” to your attention…
What follows will be many direct quotes from Google’s Official Blog, followed by my opinions.
Initial Statements
This came from Google:
“Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.
Some background for those of you who don’t build search engines for a living like us: when you search Google, you’re not searching the live web. Instead you’re searching Google’s index of the web which, like the list in the back of a book, helps you pinpoint exactly the information you need.”
For SEO: This means that no longer can you afford to only focus your Search Engine Optimization efforts in one area, and gone are the days of sit-it-and-quit-it static websites (were they ever that good anyway?). Google will be indexed a wide variety of different media types and throwing them all into the search results in the hopes of providing the best possible and most relevant information to its users.
What Can You Do? Start a blog, or add a blog to your site. Become active in several social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare. Try out content syndication sites such as Digg (bad example), Reddit, etc. Makes videos and submit them to YouTube, Vimeo, or Metacafe. A good analogy would be to think of your past marketing as being just a fish in the pond, and now you must try to become an octopus.
“So why did we build a new search indexing system? 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.”
For You: Again, more emphasis on the need to utilize several types of media and outlets including video, social media, blogging, etc.
Explanation of Old vs. New Index
“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.
Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. 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. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.
We’ve built Caffeine with the future in mind. Not only is it fresher, it’s a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results to you. So stay tuned, and look for more improvements in the months to come.”
What This Tells Me:
- Websites will be indexed much more quickly.
- Higher emphasis on placing the most relevant (whatever the medium) at the top of the results.
- There may be some sort of consolidation of their indexes between the Supplemental and Permanent, although I’m not positive on this one.
Ultimately, I think that they’re trying to put the focus on the user, while keeping up with the trends in technology, as well as mediums used to view and produce online content to provide a better and more robust experience. While it will be sort of a hodgepodge of information, it will ultimately provide users with more options quickly, and hopefully a higher relevancy of information – which should ultimately make us happier as searchers!
Well, that’s my thoughts. What are yours?
