A WebmasterWorld thread asks if Google's index is indeed expanding with Caffeine or not. As you all know, Google Caffeine officially launched last week after much speculation, anticipation and confusion.
Caffeine, as we have said to exhaustion by now, is not a ranking algorithm change. It is a change to how Google stores data in their index and how they find new content for their index. It is an indexing game changer for Google, but not a ranking algorithm change.
Google said they are able to index and show that new indexed content faster in the search results. Google said they can index more and more, because the infrastructure scales better. Google said they can pull out meta data from pages at a better and more accurate rate than ever before.
So will Google's index size increase? Matt Cutts of Google said that Caffeine's index size is about the same size as the previous index. So one would have to assume that over time, Caffeine will be much larger than the previous index. Larger in size in number of documents indexed, larger in size in fresh content and larger in size in meta data captured.
I believe that once Google is more comfortable with Caffeine out in the public, they will be more comfortable crawling more and more content at rate they never did before. Will that content rank? That depends on how well you pass the May Day test.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
