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Google Caffeine jolts worldwide search machine

Google has completed the roll-out of its next-generation search infrastructure, the indexing system overhaul known as "Caffeine." According to the company, the new setup provides "50 per cent fresher" results than its previous system. Mountain View rolled out a public test of the Caffeine index in a single data center last …

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Morpho Devilpepper
WTF?

Apples to Orange Peels

Is it really necessary to use these bizarre allegorical units of measurement? It's like back in grammar school, with the teachers saying odd things like "T-Rex was taller than 4 basketball players standing on each other's shoulders." Considering how seldom you see such strange acts of acrobatic inanity, it doesn't really help you picture it. Makes it worse, as you then have to imagine why the hell the ballplayers would attempt such a stunt.

Captain TickTock
Joke

Classic Coke, anyone?

The post is required, and must contain letters.

Dirk Koopman
Thumb Down

er.. one of these assertions must be false...

"At the moment, the index takes up nearly 100 million gigabytes of storage in one (distributed) database, and new information is added at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes each day."

Which, on the face of it, means that in the next fortnight or so the index will have doubled in size. I wonder what Google has been doing all these years?

Stewart Atkins
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The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

Building Caffeine?

Sorry that handle is already taken.
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Presumably...

...a large proportion of that "hundreds of thousands of gigabytes each day" updates/replaces existing information in the index, rather than being simply dumped on top of the existing index.

John Sanders
Linux

Flash decaff

How many iPads would you need to run Caffeine? 1,562,500, and they would stretch for 235.75 miles. That's almost 240 miles of no Adobe Flash.

LOL! that means 240 miles of flash decaffeinated web.

Kristin McKechie
Alert

Constant Re-Indexing of Existing Pages??

Wouldn't this make Google into the worlds largest DDOSer if they are hitting every web server on the planet fast enough to scan every page every few minutes or so as they claim....

Bye Bye bandwidth....

Kobus Botes

Shouldn't the Reg Standards Soviet

start cracking down on these blatant standards abuses (especially by their own contributors)?

Surely three miles per second should be 34486.7226 linguines per second, or even 34.9144 Brontosauruses (Brontosauri?) per second!

Another shocking omission is the actual amount of data stored. Assuming 160 GB as the capacity of the largest iPod, the current size of the index translates to a staggering 94 porn years and growing by the second.

Mind-boggling, to say the least.

Peter Gathercole
Alert

Alarming image when I read Caffeine

I imagine thousands of Google employees rushing around shuffling paper, each quaffing copious amounts of Jolt Cola!

kevin king

www.google.co.uk

more to the point what have they done to the .co.uk google home page this morning....

why are they using an American skylight on a .co.uk site? surely it should be tilbury, belfast or liverpool docks for the UK

Peter Gathercole
FAIL
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I think the image is changing throughout the day

Earlier is was an aerial picture of a field of flowers.

I must admit that if they continue to do this, and force you to create a google account to fix the background, I might revert to Altivista as my default search engine!

Anonymous Coward
FAIL
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Thats gonna piss loads of ppl off...

I mean seriously, WTF is this? If I wanted to look at Athena style poster art all day I'd go to an art store! Why on earth have they forced a set of disgusting full screen photo art on everyone?

Shouldn't this have been an opt-in not an opt-out? Someone's gonna get fired for this - it's gonna seriously antagonise a lot of ppl who didn't ask to be distracted.

EPIC, EPIC FAIL. FAIL. FAIL.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward
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it doesn't happen on

firefoxes' default google hompage:

http://www.google.co.uk/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official

anon since vistas password 'handling' feature is trying to change my reg password - crappy works laptop!

ttfn

fishman
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Switching to....

If google doesn't stop this stupid image background, I'm going to switch. Any recommendations?

H 3
Thumb Up

Quips like "almost 240 miles of no Adobe Flash"...

... are exactly why I read El Reg. Bravo!

Jimmy Floyd
Joke

Coming soon...

Google Nicotine, Google Ecstasy, Google Alcohol and Google Cannabis (though, to be fair, the latter does ... like ... whatever).

Anonymous Coward
Joke
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Google Meth

Gives you incredibly fast results but costs an arm and a leg so you'll prostitute yourself to pay for it, makes you lose contact with reality and ultimately induces paranoia. Wait...

Matt Piechota
Jobs Horns
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Re: Google Meth

"Gives you incredibly fast results but costs an arm and a leg so you'll prostitute yourself to pay for it, makes you lose contact with reality and ultimately induces paranoia. Wait..."

I think you're thinking of iMeth, which from the sounds of it is what Steve Jobs has been taking.

Anonymous Coward
FAIL

Idiots guide to indexing the web

Anyone who runs a busy website (especially one with a large volume of content) will know their server(s) spend most of the time servicing HTTP requests from the numerous web search outfits - Google, Yahoo, MSN, Baidu, Cuil, Yandex etc.

It's such an inefficent way to create a directory of the web - a massively duplicated effort wasting huge amounts of bandwidth, processing and power.

Magnus_Pym
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Yea but what are gonna do?

Let websites push their index info to Google. Like that's not going to be abused with seconds.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward
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Re: Idiots guide to indexing the web

"It's such an inefficent way to create a directory of the web - a massively duplicated effort wasting huge amounts of bandwidth, processing and power."

then find out which search engines are directing users to your site and block the engines that are just wasting your time. If it's as big a problem as you claim, you would have taken the initiative to do that already.

YumDogfood

Adblock + google = less stupids

Background pictures, gahhh!

Still waiting for Google crack. Oh, wait...

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

If it were a pile of paper?

"If this were a pile of paper," the blog post reads, "it would grow three miles taller every second."

No it wouldn't, it would take paper from the bottom of the pile, freshen it, and put it on the top (at a speed of 3 miles per second)

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