As I noted in my live blog coverage last night at SMX Advanced, Matt Cutts of Google announced that the Google Caffeine infrastructure is now officially completely live.
Here is a video from Search Engine Land of the SMX announcement by Matt Cutts:
Main things to know:
- This is not a ranking change, you should NOT see major ranking changes from this
- This does change how Google indexes pages, the speed, scalability and how deep they can get into a site and even into a page
- Search results should be fresher
- Search results should go deeper over time
Vanessa Fox at Search Engine Land has some great information. Google explained:
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.
For more history on Google Caffeine see our Google Caffeine archives, we covered it many many times.
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