Caffeine, Google’s codeword for the latest incarnation of their search engine, has been in slow rollout mode for almost a year now. Today, Google announced that the migration is complete and now their entire search engine index is ‘caffeinated’ so to speak.
Google claims a twofold increase in speed (how long it takes to return search results) and indexes even more of the Web. Caffeine now pays greater attention to newer results such as news and real-time updates especially facing down an age of Twitter and Facebook. The symbolic image of the difference between the old and new indexes is particularly telling.
Some amazing statistics on the aptly-named Caffeine (which will presumably only keep growing) include:
- processes hundreds of thousands of pages per second
- takes up over 100M GB of storage (that’s roughly 100 followed by 15 zeroes bytes or 100,000,000,000,000,000 bytes!)
- Adds new information at a rate of 100,000s GB per day