• eweek et al., Wednesday, June 9, 2010 2:51 PM

Despite its sundry side-interests and pie-in-the-sky pursuits, Google knows that search still pays the bills. With that in mind, the company just launched its new and improved Caffeine Web indexing system, which promises 50% "fresher" search results, and tons more retrieved content.

As eWeek explains: "Caffeine analyzes the Web in bits and pieces, processing hundreds of thousands of Web pages in parallel and updating regularly around the world so new pages, or new information on existing pages are added straightaway."

"Basically, Google is linking into real-time feeds: those from Twitter (with which it signed a deal late last year) and now also from blogs, such as Wordpress, which have implemented real-time (pushed) RSS feeds known as RSSCloud," writes The Guardian. "The key difference is that the Web index isn't now stratified; Google updates chunks of it all the time."

How should content owners respond to the changes? By sitting back and reaping the benefits, Google tells Search Engine Land. "Google told me that this change doesn't make any of the crawling, indexing, or ranking factors more or less important than before," it writes. "It simply makes crawled content available in search results more quickly before and paves the way for added flexibility in taking advantage of the [sic] whatever may come as the web evolves."

"The catch: Caffeine might very well have an impact on your position in the SERPs at some point in the future," writes Econsultancy.com, referring to search engine results pages. "While Caffeine is focused on indexing in and of itself, it provides Google with the ability to collect a lot more metadata about the documents it indexes, and it would be surprising if Google didn't look to apply that metadata in some fashion to the SERPs down the road."

While Caffeine likely makes Google search faster than rival services, Google insists that consumers are its only consideration. "People's expectations for search are higher than they used to be," Google software engineer Carrie Grimes wrote in a blog post. "Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish."

Still, "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," writes ReadWriteWeb. "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."

Read the whole story at eweek et al. »