Google search get's a caffeine kick

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! are always looking for ways to improve their search engine and Google's latest volley into search has kicked off today with a caffeine hit.

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.

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