New Web indexing system provides faster and more accurate results from a richer spread of sources, but will reshuffle search rankings for many sites…
Google rolls out its new Internet search index system today, which promises to be better for users but may cause a few headaches for Web site admins.
Codenamed Caffeine, the revamp of Google’s index technology is touted as providing “50 percent fresher results for Web searches” based on the former Google engine, as well as serving up a much larger and more timely collection of content.
Speaking at Google’s Science of Search forum in Tokyo the day before the global Caffeine hit, Google senior vice-president and uber-engineer Alan Eustace recalled that “when I was working on the Alta Vista search engine the expectation was that the information was always old, (as much as) 30 days.”
“Now the expectation is that the information is less than a minute old, it’s immediate” he told APC. “It’s gotta be fast, it’s gotta be timely. And if the right piece of information is on YouTube or Google News you shouldn’t have to search those (specific) sources”.
Caffeine should also give a jolt to mobile searching. Eustace noted a report “which predicts the number of search queries coming from smartphones will exceed desktops in 2012.”
Google has described Caffeine as the most significant change to its indexing since 2006, and notes that the Web itself has undergone radical changes in that time due to the impact of video, social networking, blogs and forums.
“Content on the web is blossoming” explains Google software engineer Carrie Grimes on the
The Official Google Blog.
“It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex.”
“Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you.”
“With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before—no matter when or where it was published.”
However, any change to Google’s indexing mechanism has a knock-on impact to the ranking order of sites listed in its search results page.
Search engine optimisation experts have had years to learn how Google’s secret indexing algorithms work in order to help push certain Web pages to the top of the pile.
Now they’ve got to start all over again, although SEO experts will likely see Caffeine as a boost to their own business.
David Flynn is attending Google’s Science of Search press briefing in Tokyo as a guest of Google.