Google Caffeine

Google Caffeine is an update in the search algorithms of the Google crawler. The aim of this update is to provide more recent results in the Google index.

General information

Google Caffeine is not a conventional update such as Penguin or Hummingbird, which affects the search itself or the search result lists. Instead, it is a fundamental change in Google’s infrastructure which was introduced in June of 2010. The reasons for its introduction, lies in the fact that the world wide web is constantly growing (thousands of websites are added on a daily basis) and its diversity in terms of multimedia content. The web contains videos, pictures, podcasts, news feeds, and more. Google Caffeine was implemented in order to stay up-to-date with current developments and particularly to shorten the time between crawling and the delivery of content.

Practical relevance

While the old Google index was based on a layer model in which only the main layer was updated, Google Caffeine now fundamentally changed this. The index is constructed by crawling the global network. Google searches for web pages, documents, and other content and stores them in the index. Caffeine works on the basis of searching increasingly smaller parts of the network to find the most current content and store it in the index. This is called incremental search. The old content which exists in the index is updated with new content. Google used a large part of its infrastructure for this purpose. The used storage capacity of the index is stated to be 100 million gigabytes. Several thousand gigabytes are added daily. According to Google, content is now being made available twice as fast.

Relevance to search engine optimization

The Caffeine update does not change the SERPs or ranking factors. Instead, content can be found more easily on the Internet, whether it is websites, videos, or images. Both webmasters and users benefit. However, webmasters should keep in mind that Google Caffeine substantially shortened the time between crawling and the results being displayed on the SERPs. Google Caffeine has opened up new ways to draw attention to yourself on the web since it crawls content formats, such as images, videos, news feeds, or podcasts as well. Buzzword: rich media.

Web Links

• Matt Cuts on Caffeine
• Difference Between Update and Data Refresh