Caffeine is a Google update that was introduced on June 8, 2010. It serves as a new and improved web indexing system. This update allowed the most popular search engine to store data more efficiently. By Google estimates, they were also able to display 50% fresher results. These are the results that are ‘timely’ and relevant to what is happening at the exact moment a related query is made.

How does this work?

In order to understand Caffeine, one must first understand how the previous indexing system worked.

Pages and content were classified based on the perceived freshness requirements. Then, based on this classification, crawlers were deployed, and while some of them looked for changes, others were tasked to re-index changed pages. If the site appeared to have fresh content, then the bots would add said content fairly quickly. If not, the site would be re-indexed only every couple of weeks. This process was true for most websites out there.

The problem with this boils down to the fact that if, for any reason, the content was misclassified as ‘not fresh,’ then relevant information could be missing from the index.

With Caffeine, Google was able to do the same process but only in a few seconds. This made the information available in the index much faster, and without losing relevant data.

This update brought significant advantages, especially for bloggers and every SEO company out there. Caffeine is continuously working its magic, and every time it finds new content, it updates the information almost immediately, storing the data in the indexes.