Google Caffeine: Understanding the New Brew

Jun. 21, 2010

Under: SEO

What is Google Caffeine?

Caffeine is Google’s new system for web indexing (see the announcement on Google’s Blog here). Google started testing Caffeine in August 2009, and the final product was finally released on June 8th, 2010 and is now being used for all Google searches. According to Google, Caffeine provides “50% fresher results for web searches than [their] previous index” and it is the largest collection of web content they have ever offered. Caffeine allows Google to update their search index much faster so that as new information is found, it is immediately updated within their index so that, “You can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.”

So How Does it Work?

Google’s old index consisted of multiple layers, some of which were updated faster than others (this updating could sometimes take a couple of weeks). This process meant that content wasn’t added to Google’s search index until a layer was updated, so there was a significant delay between content being published and the content actually appearing in the search results.

Caffeine on the other hand, analyzes the web in small portions continuously so that instead of having to refresh an entire layer, Google can just add new pages directly to the search index as they are published, which means that the published content will appear in Google’s search index faster than ever before.

Some Quick Facts About Caffeine According to Google:

Every second Caffeine processes thousands of pages in parallel (if this were a pile of paper, it would grow three miles taller every second)
The new Caffeine index takes up to 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database
Caffeine adds hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of data per day

What Does Caffeine Mean for Your Search Engine Optimization?

No one can really say for sure what affects Caffeine will have on a website’s rankings since the new indexing system is still so new, but quite a few SEO experts are already coming out with their theories. While this new indexing system isn’t a change of Google's ranking algorithms (meaning that Caffeine won’t change how Google ranks your page) it could, and most likely will, still have an effect on your site’s SEO. Updates and changes like this make it obvious that it is crucial to have an effective content management strategy and system in place. While we don't know the exact effects that Caffeine will have, using tools like a content management system and having a good content creation and management infrastructure in place can help to mitigate the negative effects that could be caused by the new indexing system.

For now, the best way to see how Caffeine will affect your rankings is to test it and monitor how you perform in Google search results. If you want to do a comparison of how your site ranks in old Google and new Google you should try the site “Compare Google Caffeine” which provides the search results for both indexing systems and can give you an idea of how your site is affected.

Posted by Amberlie Denny at June 21, 2010 8:15 AM