Google has finally announced that it’s new Caffeine search results are now live.

The new “indexing system” was rumored to be unveiled at the start of the year, but for whatever reasons (and many have speculated) it has only now been officially released.

So what’s all the fuss about?

In Google’s words: “Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.”

The new system is supposed to be faster and provide real-time search results, plus some extra bells and whistles like twitter feeds and more.

“With Caffeine, we analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally,” says Google. “As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. That means you can find fresher information than ever before — no matter when or where it was published.”