Out with the old, and in with the new Google says.  After months of testing, Google served users a steaming hot cup of Caffeine, rolling out the new version of its web indexing system.

Web indexing is at the heart of every search engine.  Microsoft recently debuted Bing, which employed a indexing system rewritten from the previous MSN Search.  That indexing service has received somewhat positive reviews and has been embraced by Yahoo, making it the second largest player in the market.

Google, which holds an extremely dominant position in the search market, made some major modifications including changes to its search results page layout which rolled out last month.  Now it's promising "50 percent fresher results for web searches" than those found with its last indexing service.

In a blog Google explains the need for Caffeine, writing, "Our old index had several layers, some of which were refreshed at a faster rate than others; the main layer would update every couple of weeks. To refresh a layer of the old index, we would analyze the entire web, which meant there was a significant delay between when we found a page and made it available to you."

It details the awesome abilities of the new unified indexing engine, stating, "Caffeine lets us index web pages on an enormous scale. In fact, every second Caffeine processes hundreds of thousands of pages in parallel. If this were a pile of paper it would grow three miles taller every second. 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. You would need 625,000 of the largest iPods to store that much information; if these were stacked end-to-end they would go for more than 40 miles."

Google suggests that those interested in search technologies visit this page, which explains in simple terms how search engines work.