Google is certainly updating their index far quicker than before. There’s been quite a bit of talk about this.

Yesterday I posted Using Text Replacement with Flash – Dangerous? at around 9:42AM.

I got an alert from Google at 11:34:

Google Blogs Alert for: link: www.redcardinal.ie

Using Text Replacement with Flash – Dangerous?
By Richard Hearne
Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors. Text (such as excessive keywords) can be hidden in several ways, …
Red Cardinal – http://www.redcardinal.ie

While the page isn’t cached (neither is my ethics post from yesterday), a search for the exact title on Google just produced the following:

The result is for my homepage rather than the post itself, but the interesting point is that there is no cache link below that entry. Checking the cached copy of the page shows a copy from August 6.

Clearly in this case the cache is not representative of Google’s index. I think Bill Slawski’s recent patent post and the patent covered itself might be timely reading material. There are interesting mentions of how Google might partition the databases and store page elements.

Not easy reading, but might be of interest to a few.