In the world of internet searching, Google is unquestionably king.
However it is facing increasing competition from both Facebook, after its recent acquisition of FriendFeed, and Bing. To maintain its market dominance, Google has announced the release of its latest web indexing optimiser, Caffeine.
Content on the web has increased dramatically over the last year with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates. Consumer expectation has also increased and searchers expect to find the latest relevant publishers and content as soon as they are released.
Google has addressed this demand by re-defining how search engines work.
Search engines are essentially an index of information, similar to what you would find in the appendices of any book: this list of information helps you to pinpoint precisely what you are looking for. However, this information has not, until now, been real-time information.
Google Search was based on a layered index system of stored data: this information was regularly updated, but unfortunately, not all of the layers of information refreshed at the same rate. Because of the huge quantity of data available on Google’s indexed pages, there were inevitable delays between the discovery of new information and its release to searchers.
Caffeine addresses this problem by analysing web content in smaller portions and releasing information globally on a continuous basis.
Every single piece of new information is added to the index instantly, giving the searcher accurate and relevant real-time information as soon as it becomes available. The new optimiser allows Google to analyse in parallel the web content of hundreds of thousands of pages of information each second. The Caffeine database takes up over 100 million gigabytes of storage and can add new information at a rate of several hundred thousands of gigabytes per day.
Bing and Facebook may well have believed that the gap in the market share for online searching was narrowing, but with the release of Caffeine the gap now appears to have widened even further.
