Google releases new indexing technology: Caffeine

Google has recently announced the public rollout of its new web indexing system, codenamed “Caffeine”.  The new indexing technology promises to provide “50 percent fresher results” compared to its previous system. The old search index consisted of several layers, some which were updated more frequently than others. Caffeine on the other hand will analyse the web in smaller portions and update Google’s search index continuously on a global scale, meaning user will be able to find fresher information than ever before.

This new indexing system is said to use a very impressive 100 million GB of storage in a single database and adds hundreds of thousands of GB of new information daily. The reason for Google's new development is to address users' higher expectations of search. Google explained, "searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish".

Caffeine is reported to be the reason for sleep deprivation (pun intended) amongst many SEO practitioners. It’s still not clear how much impact this will have for businesses that rely heavily on being ranked on the coveted first page of Google results. As the case is with many of Google's other tweaks to their mysterious ranking formula, some business and websites may see their traffic suffer as the changes could results in them falling down the search rankings. This possibility should be taken into consideration and will undoubtedly alter the way search engine optimisation experts conducts their business. Only time will tell how SEO friendly Caffeine is.

If you have any concerns regarding this new development, please do not hesitate to contact us.