Google released the Caffeine Web indexing system on June 8th, which according to Google, is 50 percent fresher search results from its previous index and contains more content than ever. This development is on the back of the Mayday update which here at Metamend we wrote about recently.
The basic explanation of how Caffeine works, is that it processes hundreds of thousands of Web pages in parallel and updates these results more regularly on a global scale. Google Research head, Peter Norvig was quoted as saying the company was updating its index every ten seconds now.
This represents a change from collecting big “batches” of Web pages to index for its search, instead Google is publishing more frequently, somewhat in real time; it processes the web in bits and pieces instead.
This means that new Web pages or newly added information on existing Web pages are added to Google almost immediately. This has resulted in Caffeine making Google searches faster than Yahoo or Bing at present.
This doesn’t mean Google changed its search formula beyond the Mayday algorithm update. These changes also will not make Google search results populate any faster; all that really changed is that Google has made it easier for you to find new content, and find that content more quickly.
Social media is set to benefit most from this update.
In the past, any new posts that normally would have been missing from search results, because Google wouldn’t have found and indexed it yet, are now visible. These same posts will be found in Google search results more quickly with Caffeine.
So in the wake of these changes, let’s talk percentages:
Caffiene claims to index new information 50 percent faster than Google’s old search queries.
Caffeine adds new information to the index at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day, and takes up nearly 100 million GB of storage in one database.
Google is still the top search engine, with 64 percent of search queries, but that’s down 1 percent compared to last month.
Microsoft and Yahoo! combined now make up about 30 percent of the search market.
This is not to say that Bing and Yahoo are out.
Microsoft in May made major increases in four major categories. Some believe this is due to the company’s focus on verticals., but the results are indisputable;
Searches on Bing related to automotive, health, shopping, and travel all increased by 95%, 105%, 100%, and 71%, compared to this month last year.
This demonstrates a desire to compete and based upon these changes, Bing is also doing something right.
Back to Google, what does it take to orchestrate a change of this magnitude? Executives at Google are reluctant to release any specific details with regard to how or what they changed but they have released some interesting analogies:
Rough calculations suggest that you would need 1,562,500 ipads, that would stretch for 235.75 miles or 625,000 of the largest iPods stacked end-to-end which would go for more than 40 miles to equal the new storage it requires to make Caffiene effective.
Thats a lot of electronics.
Aside from the Apple comparison, it will be interesting to see what Bing and Yahoo do in response to preserve or gain market share.
Perhaps, if you hit refresh in Google, Caffiene may already have the answer.
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