This new way to index pages treats all pages on the web the same, their old system treated web pages as being of different tiers, some of which were refreshed more frequently than others.

The new system, rather than troll through the web site by site now chugs through it in small portions.  This, they say, has the effect of a continuously updating index with newer, fresher results in it.

They said in a statement on their site today…

Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

There can be no doubt that Microsoft’s Bing “decision engine” has gained enormous ground since its launch a year ago and Google’s response had to be more than simply allowing users to put a photo on the default search page.

So will caffeine give the search giant the boost it needs.  They can only be hoping so, and reminding themselves every day that too much caffeine might make Google very tired.

Webmasters who want to compare search engine results can open the old and new Google search engine in two tabs to compare results. A more practicable solution is the use of a tool like Compare Google which displays search results on one page.

Users can enter a search phrase and an optional domain name on the search page. The tool will then display the old and new Google search results next to each other on the same page which makes it easier to identify ranking changes. Domain matches will be displayed in red so that ranking changes for a specific domain name can be identified on first glance.

Compare Google is a free online tool that can help webmasters find differences between Google’s old and new search result ranking algorithm.

Computers can go to sleep as well as we all know. They can fire up a screensaver or go to sleep by turning off the monitor completely and Caffeine is a software that can prevent this from happening by simulating a keystroke every 59 seconds.

The default value can be changed to a keystroke every x seconds instead. To prevent problems with running applications the software simulates a shift-down, shift-up keystroke in Windows 98 and a shift-down keystroke in Windows XP and 2000.

The software has a size of only 11 Kilobytes and could be useful if your computer falls asleep every now and then. On the other hand the sleep and screensaver intervals can be changed as well or turned off. Still nice to have a coffee cup sitting in the system tray.

And then there is the possibility of the drinking bird that presses a key for you just like Homer did in the King-Size Homer episode of the Simpsons.