Google Caffeine Released Officially June 8, 2010
Google today announced the completion of its new index algorithm called Caffeine. According to Google “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.” Read more about this here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html
Many speculate that Google created this new algorithm to compete with Twitter’s growing search share. Twitter delivers real time results for very current news, raising searcher’s expectations about the timeliness of results. Google also said they created the new algorithm in response to the growth of Internet content and different media like video, images, news and real-time updates. With this new media, the average webpage is much more complex. One Google blogger said, “Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.”
Prior to Caffeine, Google indexed web pages every couple of weeks, analyzing the entire web before refreshing the index. The new Caffeine will analyze continuously update the index in small portions globally. As pages are found they will be immediately added to the index, no matter where it was published.
What this means to your website is that there may be a period of change in your rankings as Google results adjust to the new algorithm and also that the results you see when you search may not be the same as the results another person searching the same phrase will see at any given time. In addition, fresher content will probably be indexed above legacy pages in some cases, like when news is searched. Continue to make updates in blogs and social media, continue to add video and podcasts to your pages and video repositories on the web. You will be rewarded with better search rankings for your fresh content.