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New Google Search Index 50% Fresher With Caffeine
Ponca City, We love you writes "When Google started, it would only update its index every four months. Then, around 2000, it started indexing every month in a process called the 'Google dance' that took a week to 10 days and would provide different results when searching for the same term from different Google data centers. Now PC World reports that Google has introduced a new web indexing system called Caffeine, which delivers results that are closer to 'live' by analyzing the web in small portions and updating the index on a continuous basis. 'Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale,' writes Carrie Grimes on the official Google Blog. '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.' Now not only does Caffeine provide results that are 50% fresher than Google's last index, adds Grimes, but the new search index provides a robust foundation that will make it possible for Google to build a faster and more comprehensive search engine that scales with the growth of information online."
Typical humans (non /.-ers, like us) are more familiar with gigabytes, because that is base unit of measure used in today's PCs. e.g. 6 GB of RAM, 500GB hard drive.
The blogger intentionally used GB in order to express the size of the data relative to today's average PC, because she knows her audience. Imagine that.
Dr Evil: "I demand 100 Petabytes!"
Tim Robbins: "That number doesn't exist! It's like saying I want a kajillion bajillion gigabytes!"
Disclaimer: I did not mean to imply you were Dr. Evil.
I miss the days when Google was a simple, plain HTML page resulting from the fact that it was driven by its designers and users. Now arrogant marketing VPs with no clue whatsoever push on us "features" like fade-ins (which do wonders when viewed over RDP and VNC links) and side bars while ignoring all negative feedback and making sure that no opt-out is possible to stroke their towering egos by pretending that everyone loves their "innovations". Otherwise 80% of users would have it off in an instant and the "innovator" VP's stupidity would register with some other VPs at Google HQ and give them ammo in some back-stabbing corporate ladder-climbing moves.
In other words I miss the days before Google jumped the shark.