If 2010 has proved anything about Google, it’s that the search engine giant is addicted to speed. The wide array of speed-oriented updates have made it clear just where the company’s focus lies. Now, as 2010 draws to a close, they’re quickly adding one feature: faster image search updating.
According to Search Engine Land, Google Image Search is getting some caffeine of its own. Caffeine, the revamp of Google’s data processing revamp that allowed near instantaneous updates from across the web, is finally rubbing off on image updating — a process that has long been notoriously slow.
While Google didn’t make an official announcement, they recently confirmed they “made some changes to increase the rate at which we update images in our index.” So, what does this mean for users and webmasters? For users, the update will mean fresher and more accurate content from across the web. However, for webmasters, it means something significantly more.
While images previously took months to load into image search, and an equivalently heavy length of time to change in position, new media and position-shifts can now be seen within just a few days. This makes adding images to your content and engaging in active SMO (search media optimization) more crucial and more useful than ever.
But, as noted, this increase in speed is only a predictable part of Google’s current aims. In 2010 alone, the promotion of the Chrome browser (noted for its faster load times), the introduction of caffeine (described in detail above), the major shift to Google Instant (search results so fast that they happen before you’re even done typing), and announcements about the Chrome OS (which Google is calling the fastest and most secure OS to date) show how fully Google is playing toward this in-demand quality.
