Most of a year ago we asked “Will Google’s Caffeine Update Really Change Search Results?” At that time, Google had announced a beta launch of a new indexing system for their search results. It took a while to roll that launch all the way out. It took until 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.”
To refresh the old system Google re-analyzed the entirety of its cache. This created a lag in the results. With Caffeine, they say, they now analyze the web continuously in small portions, updating the search index as they go.
Whether the speed and relevancy claims that Google is making will be born out now that Caffeine is fully in effect remains, still, to be seen. Whether it is provable quantitatively or not, the Web remains for its users more of a process or relationship than a thing. So user taste with the new system will be the proof of the pudding.
