I don’t know if I’m the only one noticing it, but Google seems a LOT faster these days.
Not in terms of returning search results; it’s always been fast at that. What I’m referring to is the googlebot’s crawling and archiving speed. And the speed with which crawled resources make it into the live searchable database.
I remember, maybe 4-5 years ago, it took something like 30 days for spidered sites to get updated in the live searchable database. These days, it’s almost instant.
Case in point: a couple of weeks ago I added an (incredibly basic) site for my company, sparkplug 9. Then I linked to it from this site. But I didn’t expect to hit Google for a week or more, or perhaps longer.
Wrong!
Simply out of perverse curiosity, the very next morning – perhaps not more than 10 hours later – I googled sparkplug9.
In shock, I noticed that the site was already spidered, in the database, and searchable.
Wow!