Coders and Coffee: Google Updates Index

Here’s an interesting post from The Official Google Blog, which discusses “Caffeine”.

In short, Caffeine is the name of Google’s new indexing system. Carrier Grimes, Software Engineer for Google, points out that a Google search does not actually crawl the “live” Web. Rather, it searches, well, an index.

Here’s Google’s rationale for refreshing its indexing system and building Caffeine:

“Content on the web is blossoming. It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.“

No doubt this enhancement will help users get closer to “real time” and user-generated content.

If you need an under-the-hood review of how Google search works, watch this excellent video: