Google never takes a rest when it comes to innovations, so it seems appropriate that its latest technological revolution is titled “Google Caffeine.” Caffeine is a new approach to search engine indexing that will change the way the web functionally works, especially for frequently updating or newer sites. But what, exactly, does all that mean?
What precisely is Google Caffeine?
Google Caffeine, released to the public in June 2010 after substantial beta testing and sandbox trials, is a new and faster web indexing system. It refreshes the search engine results more rapidly, and brags about having “50 percent fresher results.” It adds new content to the index more consistently, finds more new sites rapidly, and refreshes search engine positions in a “near real-time” way.
How did indexing work previously?
When you do a Google search on any desktops, whether current or in Google vanilla, the search engine doesn’t pull results from the web in real time. After all, that would make for incredibly long load times. Instead, Google looks through its “index” of search results. This index is a lightweight database that includes all the summary information that has been classified as relevant by the Google search robot. This index is what caffeine is changing.
Previously, Google processed information on the web in “layers.” The “main” layer of the web, which involved a full circuit of any new sites and information, was only updated once or twice a month. Other layers were refreshed on a more regular basis, with some sites being visited by Google multiple times per day. The layer to which you belonged was determined by how many links there were to your site, how well established you were on the web, and how often your site was updated. As a result, different sites were on different “refresh rates.” This meant new content was only quickly available from sites that had already established themselves effectively.
How is Caffeine different?
Caffeine has completed eliminated the “layers” of the web, and instead processes smaller chunks of web space, adding them instantly to the search index. Caffeine processes these chunks in multiple “streams of data,” which allows for a massive amount of data processing. Caffeine can literally process hundreds of terabytes of information each day. The end result of all this is that new sites will be indexed more quickly, recent information will be available more consistently, and all sites will have their new content processed more rapidly.
How will Caffeine change SEO?
The impact of Caffeine on SEO is one of the biggest questions that has come up. While official Google spokespeople have stated that there will be no major change to PageRank for existing sites, there will still be some alterations to SEO functionality. Due to Caffeine’s ability to pick up on new sites and content quickly, Caffeine will stay more up to date on links than Google vanilla did. The end result is that newer pages will be present in the results more often, and link building will happen fluidly, rather than in bursts.