In August of last year, we wrote about Caffeine, the codename for Google’s latest iteration of its search product. The idea behind it was simple yet encompassing: to “push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.” Back in December, it looked just about ready, but never came. Today, it’s finally ready to roll.
In a post on the Google Blog, the company is saying that the new web indexing system is complete. Significantly, it provides “50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered.” Basically, you’ll now be able to find more current links faster than ever before.
Google says that while the old index consisted of several layers (some of which were updated faster than others), the new Caffeine index will “analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally.”
Some big stats they throw out about Caffeine:
- 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