The Google Caffeine launch on Wednesday delivers a wider range of web content and makes more web content available instantly on Google. Flickr photo.

Caffeine, Google’s new web indexing system, went live Wednesday. Announcing the global launch of Caffeine, Google said its evolving search engine technology makes even more freshly minted web content available and delivers that new content faster than before. Searchers and web content developers don’t have to change the way they use Google. But links to a broader range of relevant content are now presented much sooner after the content is published. The Caffeine overhaul of the web indexing technology also provides Google more flexibility to keep pace with a web that is evolving at an accelerating rate.

Google Caffeine launch: speed isn’t everything

Google said the Caffeine launch delivers 50 percent fresher search results. That feature alone may be hard to translate into a benefit for the average Google user. PCWorld tested a side-by-side comparison of web indexing systems when Caffeine was in development and found that results took 0.15 seconds on the regular Google search and 0.09 seconds on Caffeine. No one else will be able to repeat that test now, since Caffeine is now the regular Google search. And 0.06 seconds probably won’t make much of a difference for searchers, no matter how tight the deadline. However, what shows up 0.06 seconds faster will make a difference for content publishing.

Real time content publishing

The immediate benefit of the Google Caffeine launch to the average user is fresher content, and more of it. Google’s Matt Cutts told Search Engine Land that that “Caffeine benefits both searchers and content owners because it means that all content (and not just content deemed “real time”) can be searchable within seconds after it’s crawled.” Search Engine Land reports that the old Google would crawl a set of pages, process those pages and add them to the index. All the pages in the batch had to wait until the whole batch was processed to be made available on Google. Now Google crawls and processes pages individually and instantly.

Caffeine: astronomical storage capacity

For Caffeine to eliminate the delay between when it finds a page and makes it available requires an astronomical amount of storage. On the Official Google Blog, Carrie Grimes said Caffeine indexed web pages on an enormous scale. Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel — every second. Paper pages processed at that rate would stack three miles high — 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. PC World adds that the bill from Apple would be $155,625,000.

Keeping up with Caffeine

The Google Caffeine launch doesn’t change web searching or content publishing. But Resource Shelf points out an important detail. Information found one day may not be there if you go back to the same location the next. This is because pages are being refreshed more frequently and the cache is also being updated more frequently. If a searcher needs content on a page the way it looked at noon on Wednesday, it’s a good idea to make a copy with something like Zotero, a Firefox extension because by 12:15 p.m. on Wednesday the content on the page might change when the cache is updated.

And you thought this type of caffeine had a big effect on business productivity.

There’s no doubt about the fact that Google is the go-to search engine for a vast majority of the world. While most casual users do appreciate the power inherent with being the world’s most-used search engine, it’s a little crazy to think of the extent this power goes to. Some people use Google to get fast cash, but there are long-term business plans and jobs that are built around the way Google works.

The mammoth search engine is introducing Google Caffeine, which the company says will increase the search engine’s speed as well as change page rankings, the order in which pages appear on Google after users type in search terms. This has ramifications for several types of businesses, not to mention individual jobs. Let’s look at a few categories of businesses that could be affected by Google Caffeine.

Google

Of course, the company is releasing Google Caffeine for its own reasons. Even though the search engine is by far the most-used in the world right now, that doesn’t mean it’s untouchable. The Guardian reports:

Despite that lead, a series of threats have emerged recently that have seen the company redouble its efforts. Chief among them is Microsoft’s continuing effort to break into the top tier of the search business, which has so far included rebranding its search engine as Bing.com and scoring a deal to take control of Yahoo’s search business.

Other possible contenders for the future of the business have emerged, too, including a “knowledge engine” called Wolfram Alpha, designed by British-born physicist Stephen Wolfram; and the emergence of so-called “real-time search” through websites like Facebook and Twitter.

Built in to the reality that Google Caffeine is aimed at keeping the top search engine in that position, it carries ramifications for Google’s competition.

Sales and marketing firms

Everyone knows that to make money, you must have a product or service to sell. Getting a high page ranking on Google is a huge advantage for anyone who offers products and services online. People used to crack open a phone book when they wanted to order pizza, find a mechanic or call the movie theater to find out movie times.

Now, people go to Google and type in “mechanic” or “pizza.” So firms hire people who focus on getting their business to pop up as close to the top as possible on the Google search engine when people type in those search terms. PC World writes:

For those businesses that live-and-die based on Google-generated traffic, this is potentially a very big deal.

In a blog post announcing the project, Google suggested that Caffeine could change search results, which raises the prospect of companies’ needing to change their search engine optimization (SEO) to protect their Google ranking.

The flip side

Just as Google Caffeine has inherent ramifications for its competitors, the potential effects on page rankings could affect SEO specialists as well as the people who cater to them. Yep, that’s a business too. PC World writes:

This also means a field day for those selling quick fixes that will supposedly give companies a top Google ranking. There’s nothing quite like something most people don’t understand, but that can dramatically effect your business, to give some people anxiety.