Google is x5 faster

Google now processes x1000 more search engine queries, compared to 10 years ago, but does each one 5 times as fast!

In a recent keynote speech by Jeff Dean from Google, he highlighted some of the major changes the search engine had implemented in the last decade and this included moving from hard disc processing to main memory of computers, which offers significant speed benefits.  This massive improvement in search technology does come at a price though - it now takes 1000 computers to handle a query rather thant the couple of dozen previously used.

Another significant change Google has made is detecting many web page changes nearly immediately. Upon crawling a page it will compute an approximation of the static Page Rank of that page, and then rolls out an index update immediately.  For many of the pages in the index, search results are now accurately updated within minutes of the page changing.

This Google development of the last few years emphasise how search engine optimisation (SEO) has moved on, and that on-page updates to a website can take effect in a very short period of time.