Do you really believe Caffeine is live?

[SEOPTI]

I don't think so. Just one example:

PR6 URLs, content updated weekly, cache date: August, 10

So either their reporting is broken or they have reverted caffeine.
All this talk about ultra fast crawling, indexing and ranking ... I don't believe it.

I will be able to believe in caffeine if they will be able to update their cache dates every 24 hours, if not it is all just speculation and for me caffeine is not live.

[Planet13]

On the other hand...

I did a post in these very forums the other day, and within 13 minutes, it was already indexed in the google SERPs. It probably took less than 13 minutes, because it was a new thread, so it had to take at lease a couple of minutes for it to clear moderation.

Maybe only things like forums and blogs and social sites get the full speed benefit of caffeine. Maybe if google sees that there is a regular pattern (say weekly updates, instead of updates every hour or every few minutes), it only updates their index once every couple of weeks?!?!?!

Also, I remember reading something about google only indexing blogs in their blog index that have two or more authors (not the regular google index, but their blog index, whatever that is called). So maybe having a site where lots of different people contribute is valued higher than single authors...

All this is just pure conjecture on my part though.

[AnkitMaheshwari]

@SEOPTI, in our site as well a lot of high PR 5 or 6 pages are showing a last cached date of "August, 10" only. Earlier these pages use to get crawled almost daily.

I guess it must be some bug.

[ErnestHemingway]

Hello
How many good backlinks does your PR6 have? No matter how advance the SE gets and the speed of crawling you do need some great links pointing to your site to get more frequent crawls.

[Andylew]

Yes caffine is live, it is certainly faster at listing pages but caffine doesnt increase the rate a site is crawled so obviously if it takes a few days to find it might then be added or if not seen as a high enough priority will be scehduled for the dance. Interestingly since caffine instead of a dance at the start of every month to add in the lower priority pages we are now seeing a mid month dance too so the time for pages to be listed which are not considered a priority is in effect halved.

[tedster]

Here's one major speed focus of Caffeine, as I understand it.

In the old Big Daddy architecture, crawl data came in and was processed into a pile of meta data that was assigned to each URL. But that new meta data could only be introduced into the live rankings after being processed in very large batches - this meant significant time delays.

With Caffeine, the newly generated meta data can be folded into the live rankings with extreme granularity - no more waiting until the rest of a big batch before it gets done.

[1script]

I also have sites (both well-linked and not so much) with the homepage cache date stuck on August 10th or August 11th. I'm not sure it has to do with the infrastructure though. In my mind it actually hints at some underlying problem with the site because those that have their homepage cache date stuck like that are not doing too well in Google.

[scottsonline]

Checkout Drudge, front page story of a totally messed up Google result. If that's caffeine I'd hate to see the next improvement.