Google adds more caffeine

Google has just upgraded its vast, humming indexing machine and appropriately enough called the new system Caffeine. The name fits. Google’s index is now refreshed much more frequently than before. I hesitate to say faster, because when you’re talking about Google crawling a significant portion of human civilization, speed becomes a somewhat elastic concept.

Caffeine processes more than 100 000 pages in parallel every second, pouring over 100 000 gigabytes of fresh data into the index each day. The index itself is already more than 100 million gigabytes large. Did I get the number of zeros right? “What the hell is a gigawatt”, as Marty McFly would ask.

So this is not exactly the sort of caffeine hit you get from a nervous barista and a double espresso. This is industrial-strength stuff. Enough to keep a small country awake until Thursday. And, naturally, faster indexing comes with consequences.

Another kind of caffeine.

For one thing, what happens to the SEO hijackers, spammers and assorted digital parasites who infest websites in the hope of clawing their way a few precious positions higher in Google? If Google can find legitimate content faster, it can presumably find their garbage faster too. The arms race continues. Nobody goes home happy.

There’s another, slightly more sobering consequence. Think before you publish. The web has always had a remarkably good memory, but Caffeine gives it better reflexes. That angry rant that seemed like an excellent idea after several drinks can now find its way into Google’s machinery with impressive efficiency.

And once it’s there, good luck explaining to the Internet that you’ve changed your mind. Google has had another cup of coffee. Perhaps the rest of us should have one before pressing Publish.