Google Caffeine: A New Search Index to Challenge Bing

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Finally Google has unveiled the next generation architecture for web search. The new infrastructure Caffeine would speed up indexing while preserving accuracy and comprehensiveness. Although it might be difficult for general users to find difference in search result, Web developers would easily identify a few differences with the Caffeine Web indexing system.

Before rolling out, Caffeine underwent extensive testing phase. Google along with its several data centers tested Caffeine for almost 10 months. The strenuous task was carried out in order to yield a fresh new indexing system that hugely differs from the previous one.

Caffeine is undoubtedly a menacing news for rivals of Google since it’s capable of faster search than Bing of Yahoo and many others. But Google has denied any other intention behind bringing Caffeine than helping its users.

Google software engineer Carrie Grimes said,

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 Web page 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.

Grimes also mentioned that 100 million gigabytes of storage is required to accommodate Caffeine in one database. Perhaps you need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store hundreds of thousands of gigabytes of fresh content that Caffeine adds each day.

Lets delve into how Caffeine works. Well, you would be glad to know that Caffeine processes millions of pages in parallel. If you consider piles of papers, it would grow three miles taller every second.

Caffeine is built to meet ever rising expectations of the users. It’s been several times that Google received complaint for its old indexing system that very often fails to refresh a page in time. While some of the layers were refreshed faster, others took couple of weeks for update. With Caffeine, Google would be able to update their search index continuously. New pages, or new information on existing pages would be added to the index as soon as they are made available on the web. That means, you would get fresher information than ever before.

Caffeine is coming only one month after Google launched its fresh search user interface that brings new options to the users for slice and dice results. Now with this new search service Google is expecting to increase its search share which is currently sticking at 65 percent.