Yesterday, Google announced it’s new search index, Caffeine. What is Google  Caffeine?  How will Google Caffeine affect my SEO?   The premise behind Google Caffeine is that they can offer you MUCH fresher results, and that pages can be indexed at a MUCH faster rate that they’d previously been able to.  Google surmizes that people want to receive much more relevant content faster, and with the advent and exponentially increasing popularity of video, articles, blogs, and other various rich media content and information publication platforms, Google says that Caffeine can and will deliver.  How will it affect our SEO?  Remains to be seen.  From what it says, it will be possible for pages to get indexed and actually show up in the search results MUCH faster than before, but it could also create a demand for pages that refresh much more frequently, or content that is updated much more quickly, thus more labor intensive and increased effort and or costs associated with SEO.  Of course, as always, automation kicks in and enables these things to be taken into consideration and rolled out without manual intervention after being setup, but we’ll see.  According to Google “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.”  That surely WOULD require a healthy dose of caffeine to manage that, and for many, to even begin to understand it.  As for search results and how it will affect SEO if at all, it’s only a day or so old, and the jury is out for sure still on Google Caffeine.  Read more about it here on Google’s official blog http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/our-new-search-index-caffeine.html