Google's New Search Index Caffeine Goes Live

Google has finally released the awaited update to its search indexing technology, providing a jolt of Caffeine to the search industry.

The company announced the release of its Caffeine indexing technology--which it has been testing for almost a year--in a blog post late Tuesday evening. "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," the company said in a blog post.

Google started testing Caffeine in August 2009, and search guru Matt Cutts said in November to expect the new system to go live "after the holidays," although it didn't sound like he had meant Memorial Day. At the time, Google said the new index would be the most significant change it has made to the basic technology that crawls the Internet and ranks Web pages since 2006.

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