After months of testing small bits of this massive update to the Google search engine algorithm, the Google Caffeine update is officially live. On 8 June 2010, Google announced this on their official blog – Our new search index: Caffeine
The first time I heard of this big update was back in 2009 when they announced that they are planning this major update to their search engine – Help test some next-generation infrastructure
Google is steering towards more social media involvement (Google Buzz, Google Wave, etc) and you might have noticed a couple of beta tests taking place over the last couple of months when doing searches on this popular search engine.
So what is this Google Caffeine update?
With Caffeine, we analyse the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.
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 – Our new search index: Caffeine
Video from Matt Cutts explaining this
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