09 June 2010 | Author: J. Morton Search Copywriter

Google retools search index with Caffeine

Not content to stay in the shadows while competitors such as Apple steal the spotlight with their latest innovations, Mountain View, California-based Google has recently announced it has completed an entirely new way to index the web.

Named 'Caffeine', the new system provides 50 per cent fresher search results than the current Google indexing system, the search giant said in an Official Google Blog posting. The post said this would make it easier to find relevant news stories and blog content closer to its publishing time.

Explaining the current system, software engineer Carrie Grimes said the company's search results were not necessarily representative of the "live web", but rather that the configuration rested upon several 'layers' of web content, with each being refreshed at different rates. Base layers, she said, would only be refreshed every few weeks.

"With Caffeine, we analyse 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 the index.

"That means you can find fresher information than ever before - no matter when or where it was published."

She explained that the new system would index hundreds of thousands of pages every second, comparing it to a pile of paper growing three miles taller every second.

The new system is meant to improve the already dominating search engine in a time of integration with social media sites, tweets, and video and audio postings.

"We've built Caffeine with the future in mind," Grimes said.

"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."