Tech: The root of Google’s new Caffeine engine: 9/11. No, really
- The onslaught of news readers that day made them emphasize immediacy. Remember September 11, 2001? We still had the Internet, yeah, but our search engines were super-primitive back then. So when people looked up news on Google, stories weren’t updated. Eventually, Google started caching sites like CNN to offset this, but it taught them a long-term lesson. “That was a real wake-up call, where we said we have to pay a lot of attention to freshness,” said Matt Cutts of Google’s spam team. “We knew that before, but we thought 30 days was pretty good.” Which led the the development of Google News, and later, Caffeine. Now, what was once updated monthly is now thrown up immediately. Neat, huh? source