Google officially announced the completion of the new Google index, dubbed Caffeine for it speed and freshness. This new index has been a long time in the sandbox and even longer implementing, but it seems to deliver faster, more relevant and fresher search results. While as website owners this has complicated our job on many levels, I think the positive experience for searchers is profound. Less frustrated searchers are more likely to buy, complain less and tolerate more.

Google’s new index is faster, larger and far more comprehensive. Media results, news, blogs…. They are all fresher.

Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, 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.

Back in August of 2009 Google began the undertaking of streamlining and bug fixing the Caffeine update… They even provided all of us an opportunity to use the development index in the sandbox and provide feedback. How nice that we, developers, searchers and rubber neckers could see, touch and participate.

In the “future web” we see everyday feedback, transparency and trust are commanding factors… Google seems to have a solid grasp on this concept. They expect it from you and demonstrate it themselves in the way they run your business. So caffeine is very simply put, Google’s effort to grow effectively and deliver the best product (search) to their visitors. I think aligning yourself in this type of mentality is the key to your Internet success.