tedster - 3:02 pm on Jun 9, 2010 (gmt 0)

If Caffeine folds in new pages and churns the index more regularly and incorporates new pages...

Not just completely new pages, either. As I understand it, the old Big Daddy infrastructure could only integrate and "score" newly crawled data (even for old pages) on a sort of delayed cycle, and in large batches. Caffeine speeds that, allows for the "scoring" meta data to be updated almost continually -- and also opens up the possibility of scoring for even more ranking factors.