New Google Search Index 50% Fresher With Caffeine 216
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."
It's called the metric system. Use it. (Score:5, Informative)
Caffeine takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one database
A million gigabytes is what we call a petabyte.
Re:Caffeine?! (Score:3, Informative)
On a related note, what's with Apple pimping Bing all of a sudden?
Because, at this point, Google is more of a threat than Microsoft. Apple knows that the chances of OSX catching up to Windows in terms of market share are practically zero. However, Android poses a credible threat to Apple's mobile popularity here in America.
Re:That's a hundred petabytes of storage (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's called the metric system. Use it. (Score:3, Informative)
by saying "A million gigabytes is what we call a petabyte.", the GP obviously implied that the article should have used "100 Petabytes", after all, he didnt say "100 million gigabytes is what we call a petabyte."
Re:Caffeine?! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Caffeine?! (Score:1, Informative)
Microsoft didn't bail Apple out of anything. I forget the exact reason why, but Microsoft bought $150 million worth of Apple stock at a time when Apple had billions of dollars in cash sitting in the bank. Microsoft later sold that stock for a profit.
The more significant announcement was that Microsoft would continue to support Microsoft Office for the Macintosh for at least 5 years. Having Office was very important to Apple, but Microsoft also made a lot of profit from that product, so it's not exactly as though continuing it was charity.
Re:Altavista (Score:2, Informative)
All such "features" are universally turned off by pretty much any user that has a clue how to do it, irrespective of where they can be found
As I said, you are completely out of touch with reality if you think that a majority of users have any interest in things like that. Making the claim that management somehow snuck an almost-universally hated feature in is absurd and only harms your credibility. You do not represent the majority of users. Slashdot does not represent the majority of users.
If you don't, then why are you arguing? I'm not arguing that fade-in is worth it; only that the majority of users wouldn't care and/or be aware enough to opt-out.
(On a side note, anecdotal "evidence" disagrees with your claim about the sidebar's benefit. Google likely included it because of the positive reaction users had toward Bing's related searches in their sidebar. At the recent WWW2010 conference I attended, the side bar was viewed positively by engineers from Bing, Yahoo, and Google alike. Considering they have access to real-world usage data and you do not, I'm inclined to take their side. In fact, Bing claimed the UI redesign _alone_ significantly increased traffic before any backend changes had taken place.)