Have I understood Caffeine correctly?

[samit]

Hello Friends,

In recent time search engine world, the most discussed topic is Google Caffeine Update. I went through few articles, to know detail about it. But after few discussion I understood:

1. crawling the web more comprehensively,

2. determining reputation and authority

3. returning more relevant results more quly

are the missions. And the Usibility is an imporant issue in this.

I would like to confirm whether my understanding is right or wrong.

Waiting for some great suggestions.

[aristotle]

1. crawling the web more comprehensively
I think this is correct.

2. determining reputation and authority
I'm not sure about this. But it could be a secondary effect, because more comprehensive crawling would allow them to collect more data, which, if properly analyzed, could improve the evaluation of reputation and authority.

3. returning more relevant results more quly
Yes, this is the ultimate goal. They hope that the ability to collect and analyze more data will enable them to improve the search results.

There has been some confusion about what Caffeine represents. Some people seem to confuse it with algo changes and major past "Updates" such as Florida and Big Daddy. In my opinion this is incorrect.

[Silvery]

Regarding #3 - I'd expand on that and say that I think that part of Caffeine's goal was to absorb realtime updates extremely rapidly, such as status updates from sites such as Twitter.

As a side effect of absorbing some blog and microblogging updates more rapidly, they would have had to also develop methods for rapidly assigning some sort of ranking values for that content, without having to perform the historically-arduous, multi-day iterations to calculate final PageRank.

[tedster]

There is a parallel between Caffeine and Big Daddy. Big Daddy was also essentially an infrastructure change, one that allowed Google to move from monthly updates to "everflux" changes.

[aristotle]

There is a parallel between Caffeine and Big Daddy. Big Daddy was also essentially an infrastructure change, one that allowed Google to move from monthly updates to "everflux" changes

Thanks Tedster. I knew that. But people often include Big Daddy in lists of past major 'updates". The same thing will probably happen with Caffeine too, especially if it causes noticeable changes in the rankings.

[tedster]

I know things get blurry in common speech, aristotle. Actually, there were major algo changes right before the Big Daddy infrastructure change - and they rolled out in three stages over several months, longer than any previous update. That was what we named Update Jagger [webmasterworld.com] and it was clearly designed to get things in shape for the Big Daddy migration that followed

[samit]

Thanks for the great updates. Now things are clearing up in my mind.
Just to add another thing - I found in a blog that from now onwards Google will update their Page Rank calculation method as well. As per as I know till now any link from where a site can get some page rank share will be counted for Page Rank calculation. But if they change that, may be along with the page rank share the relevancy of the site will also be judged.

What do u think.

[aristotle]

I think that relevancy is already taken into account, but as a separate factor rather than as part of the page rank calculations.

[tedster]

I'd say you're exactly right. The Google patents often talk about "query-independent factors" - such as PR and trust, versus "query-dependent" factors, the relevance and intention associated with a query.