Google announced today that it has completed its new web indexing system called Caffeine. The company claims it provides 50% fresher results for web searches than the previous index and is the largest collection of web content it’s offered.

"Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before," says Google software engineer Carrie Grimes.

"Content on the web is blossoming. It’s growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people’s expectations for search are higher than they used to be," adds Grimes. "Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish."

With Caffeine, Google says it analyzes the web in small portions and updates its search index on a continuous basis (all around the world). New pages and updates to existing pages are added straight to the index, meaning freshness will be increased.

Caffeine takes up 100 million GB of storage in one database, and adds new info at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigs per day.

Caffeine was announced nearly a year ago, when Google’s Matt Cutts told us about it at SES San Jose. Now SMX Advanced is going on, and I’d expect to hear more from Matt about it out there (he hinted at it when we talked to him at Google I/O last month).