In August of 2009 Caffeine was introduced to parts of Google’s ecosystem and there has been plenty of speculation as to just how much it has impacted results. Of course, whenever anything is rolled out to just a percentage of the Google search as a whole it can be tough to see just what it is actually doing.

Now there is no more need to wonder as Google has rolled out Caffeine in all its glory. The Official Google blog says

Today, we’re announcing the completion of a new web indexing system called Caffeine. 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.

So there you have it. When you read that statement it is pretty amazing that there is a “new” web indexing system from the leader in search. So what brought this on?

So why did we build a new search indexing system? Content on the web is blossoming. 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. In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be. Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish.

Google’s old system was layered and it updated slowly compared to the Caffeine experience which is diagrammed below.

Here are some fun facts that Google shared as well:

• Every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second.
• Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database and adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day.
• You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles.

So Caffeine is here. What do you think? Have you had enough caffeine yet to comment?

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