Caffeine went live "in the last few days" and is now being used in all Google data centers, he said.

In addition to serving "fresher" results, Caffeine "massively increases our ability to scale up," Cutts said. The company will be able to index many more documents -- "on the order of 100 petabytes," he said.

Caffeine adds new information at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day, Google said in a blog post.

The progression in how Google does its indexing mirrors how people increasingly expect to find the very latest information online. Google noticed that after the Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S., when people were looking for the most up-to-the-minute information possible, Cutts said.

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