Matt Cutts points to a video interview (embedded above) on Google’s Caffeine infrastructure update.
“It’s a pretty fundamentally big change” Matt says. What I’d like to know is why and in response to what changes on the web. Of course, the major changes in how the web works are clear: Real Time Search.
In short, Google represents a remarkable achievement: the ability to query the static web. But it remains to be seen if it can shift into a new phase: querying the realtime web.
It’s inarguable that the web is shifting into a new time axis. Blogging was the first real indication of this, but blogging, while much faster than the traditional HTML-driven web, is, in the end, still the HTML-driven web.
Part and parcel to this shift is the web’s adoption of Flash/Silverlight/Ajax – a shift to assuming the web works in real time, like an application on your desktop. That makes it damn hard to index stuff, because pages are not static, they are created in real time in response to user demand. This is a new framework for how the web works, and if Google doesn’t respond to it, Google basically will become relegated to a card catalog archive of static HTML pages. No way will Google let that happen…
(By the way, one of the reasons I was impressed with Wowd was exactly because of its ability to, at scale, track a new signal in the web – the signal of what we are actually doing in real time…as opposed to the signal of the link…but more on that later.
Matt was asked if Caffeine was specifically about Real Time, and he was not totally specific about this but it’s pretty obvious it is all about this shift.
Oh, and Matt says it’s not because of Bing. In one way, I agree. But let’s be real. Microsoft and Yahoo did this deal because Yahoo alone could never sustain the infrastructure costs associated with indexing and processing the Real Time Web. So in truth, Google did this because it had to, just like Microsoft and Yahoo did what they did because they have to. If you want to play, you have to get the infrastructure right.
Here’s SEL’s take on it.