Google is having a spot of trouble with their Caffeine sandbox, or so we are told. Matt Cutts Twittered that the Sandbox was being taken down temporarily, but should be back up sometime today… what happened?
It was only up for two days, but the new indexing and search engine infrastructure Google named Caffeine was getting a lot of attention – until it abruptly went AWOL. Google Engineer Matt Cutts Tweeted the announcement, saying that upgrades to a data center were responsible for the downtime.
“We’re taking down the Caffeine sandbox until late Thursday afternoon-ish. Upgrades in datacenter. Don’t worry, it’ll be back.” Cutts promised. Visitors to the sandbox site get an error page announcing “System maintenance” that says “We are upgrading elements of our data centre. The Caffeine sandbox should be available for searching again in a few hours.”
Matt Cutts later explained in a post at Search Engine land that the Caffeine sandbox was powered by a single data center. Google decided to make some upgrades to several power components, and the site should be back up by Thursday evening Pacific time.
Google has constantly improved its search engine, but Caffeine was significantly;y different enough for them to give it a whole new name. The sandbox was launched in order to give developers and advanced users a look at the unique new infrastructure that will soon be powering Google’s search engine.
Caffeine ushers in changes in underlying technology, particularly indexing, so web developers and site owners will be affected. Real-time searches will be the object of focus, although there aren’t yet any visual changes to the search experience.
Tags: algorithms, Caffiene, Google