After almost a year of testing-and-talking about a new and improved search technology, Google finally announced the completion of their new Caffeine index earlier this month. As we know, “search” is Google’s core offering and when they first started testing the new technology last August, they promised that the improvement would represent the most significant upgrade to the basic crawl-for-page-rankings technology since 2006.

Here’s a visual that compares the old Google index technology with the new Caffeine index:

To better understand, it’s important to know that when you type in keywords in Google’s search box, you’re not actually searching “the web”; you’re searching Google’s index of the web. Whatever they find, you find.

As illustrated in the diagram above, the old technology was built on layers. Refreshing any one of those layers involved a complete analysis of the web (yes, the entire web). Even the main layer was updated only every couple of weeks so you can imagine the delay between Google finding a page, analyzing its relevance, adding it to their index, and finally ending up in your search results.

The objective of the new indexing technology was speed and comprehensiveness. With Caffeine, Google analyzes the web in smaller portions and updates their search index both continuously and globally. The result is fresher and more inclusive information for searchers.

Google updated their index technology to meet searcher’s expectations. With the advent of images, real-time updates and videos, the internet is becoming a more multifaceted medium and both searchers and publishers expect the latest and most relevant content to appear in search results.

According to Google, Caffeine meets that expectation by providing 50% fresher results than the old technology as it processes hundreds of thousands of pages on a continuous basis. To demonstrate the concentration of this process, if the web pages that go through its “crawl process” were a pile of paper, the pile would grow taller by three miles per second!

Benefitting both searchers and publishers alike, Google’s new Caffeine index processes more web content than ever before. This includes news stories, blog posts and forum comments; providing links to relevant content much sooner after its publication than was possible with the old technology.

According to Carrie Grimes, a Google Software Engineer, “We’ve built Caffeine with the future in mind. Not only is it fresher, it’s a robust foundation that makes it possible for us to build an even faster and comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online, and delivers even more relevant search results to you.”

Google’s new Caffeine index is especially good news for businesses.

“The main difference is that businesses will see searchers arriving faster on their websites because Caffeine can index pages much more quickly than our previous system. The nice thing is that Google users will see fresher results without users (or business owners) needing to do anything special,” stated Google Engineer, Matt Cutts,  in a recent one-one-one post over at Entrepreneur Daily Dose.

To expand on Cutts acknowledgment of the new technology’s efficiency, Google’s new Caffeine provides businesses with a powerful springboard for increasing awareness, engaging customers and ultimately boosting revenue. The opportunity for implementing successful web stratagems has also increased by an equivalent 50%.

That’s good news indeed!