Google Update Promises 50% Fresher Results
Google has finally announced the completion of a new search index that will deliver 50 percent 'fresher' search results.
Dubbed Caffeine, Google's Carrie Grimes unveiled the improved search index yesterday 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," she said.
Grimes explained that with the old index, some layers were refreshed faster than others. This meant that there was quite a substantial delay from when Google found to when we could see it in search results. With Caffeine, Google is constantly examining and updating small sections of the search index. As the company finds new pages or new information on old pages, it adds them straight to the index, meaning fresher search results.
"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," Carrie writes.
"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."
Grimes failed to mention whether the transition to Caffeine will be a slow roll-out, similar to other products launched by Google, or if we'll all start seeing fresher search results from today onwards.

that's a lot of data I wonder how they do the searches so fast if there is 100 million GB of unique data, and it has to find your exact query.
it cannot possibly all be on a RAM like solution in order to make it fast enough....
this, (addressing steve jobs) is magical!
we just replaced our SAN which is 96 tarabytes = just under $100,000
I would think Googles storage is around $700 a tarabyte (discounted)
SOOO 100,000,000 gigs = 97656.25 tarabytes
=$68,359,375
if 1 gig = $700, Keep in mind this is not hardware you use @ home... there not hooking up 100,000 caviar black drives.
What's a tarabyte?
Wow, what were you thinking? 700 per Terabyte? I am in tech and realize they don't buy SATA drives off the walmart shelf, but seriously the drive alone even at 100% duty cycle quality even if they add fibre channel drives should never cost 700/tb. At my last job, we had a 20 TB total EMC SAN with 15K RPM Fibre channel drives and the drives themselves only cost around 350 a TB and that was 3 years ago pricing. Not to argue, but I think you could have done better on a per TB price. Now, if your whole system came out at 700/TB that makes more sense. Our 20 TB was far more expensive than 7000 dollars in raw drive cost. As stated, there is a lot of infrastructure needed to support those drives. They just don't set around and soak up data...as you know.
we made a deal with IBM where they pay half and we pay half if we upgrade many servers...
we spent $250,000 total. Our main san is SSD/fiber and yah was almost 100k for 96 TB retail, we paid only $50 (half price)
seriosuly? what do you do for a living?
we didnt just pick IBM and give them $250k we did research for months.
@ one time i used to be an IBM employee even. (hate them)
What does your company do that's so sensitive to data integrity it will pay $700 per terabyte? (I'm not attacking you, just curious).
That was the impression I got from his post.
Even if we're being incredible conservative here, $100mil isn't a bad investment be any means for google to improve their search (which according to Carol Bartz is all that google does) by that much.
We sell chicken lol! seriously
We never went over the top to protect integrity, this was just the best deal we could get. Keep in mind this is Canada, not USA... we likely have higher prices.
I would like to mention, working with IBM was a nightmare, our systems were pretty "cutting edge" AKA untested! was a huge mistake.... we should have gone with last years model.
Same as our Citrix environment, we should have not upgraded to 2008, it's just too new... we are having huge issues with print servers due to lack of support from Xerox.
We also run XP on all machines until recently i pushed out 20 laptops with Win7 as testers.
I envy your companies decision to stick with XP. Vista is a pain to support. (Failed updates anyone?)
bumpy ride
joy ride