Google’s Matt Cutts is giving a keynote at SMX and is discussing the roll out of the Caffeine update.

Apparently in the last few days, Caffeine went live on all data centers.  

According to Matt, in the past Google used to roll out large updates using a “Google Dance” whereby datacenters updated gradually.   In 2003 Google introduced an incremental indexing system in which they crawled 10% of the web every night which was pushed out to all datacenters nightly.   This update system was known as Fritz.

The new crawl algorithm is now known as Caffeine.   With the new update, pages crawled are immediately added to the index and will instantly appear in the SERPs.

According to Matt – the results are 50% fresher and Caffeine enables Google to scale up their index in a massive way.

In a recent interview with Mike McDonald of Web Pro News, Matt Cutts discussed the current state of Google Caffeine – the search engine’s next major update.

Matt last discussed Caffeine last November when he reassured webmasters that it wouldn’t be rolled out over the holiday period.    This came as a relief to many ecommerce sites who were concerned that the new algorithm may affect their ranking during their busiest and most prosperous time of the year.

However, most SEOs expected Caffeine to roll out shortly after the New Year and have been suprised that there has been no mention of it – leading to rumours that Google have been experiencing problems with it.

Matt confirmed in the interview that they’re still on-track with the roll out and are just being cautious.   There is still currently only one datacenter running with the new Caffeine update, but he expects a European datacenter to follow soon.    He then expects full roll-out over the coming weeks/months – leaving the timescales still fairly vague.

For more on the story, and other Google news – you can watch the interview here:

WebProNews Interviews Matt Cutts