Google had announced this week on their official blog that the new search index called Caffeine is now working on the search page. We think this is a major news and we like to feature a post today to announce how Google search works now.
The image posted by Google is quite clear where Google search is heading: to deliver best results in the shortest period of time.
Basically this is what Caffeine does, it woks 50% faster than the old index and it provides more fresh results in real time, now more than ever. Year by year Internet evolves and Google must search through more and more websites to deliver some of the best queries. PageRank had a big importance at the old index, but now Caffeine wants to go to the next level and take into consideration more factors.
Articles, images, videos are posted almost instantly in any corner of the world and searchers need to find the latest relevant content, while publishers expect to found their content as quickly as possible. Google have to keep up with social networks( Twitter, Facebook, MySpace) and choose live results from them, because this is some of the user demands.
Here’s how the old index worked:
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.
And now what Caffeine means:
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.
