Last week Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) announced a new web indexing system called Caffeine. This new index is designed to provide search results 50 percent fresher than the previous index, enabling users to find relevant content sooner after publishing.

Tom Nolle analyzed the affect of Caffeine, noting that the new index could be a double edged sword. On the one hand, fresher content and real-time news when catastrophe strikes is great news. One the other hand, the focus on speed of delivery as opposed to focus on quality and analysis “trivializes what the internet can do.”

He goes on to ask if by accepting results without any real depth of analysis and we lose the ability to have a real understanding of what’s going on.

“We can’t build an industry on Tweets…on small status updates,” Nolle said.

In an interview on Entrepreneur’s Daily Dose blog, Google engineer Matt Cutts indicated that Caffeine may provide fresher results, but Google has not thrown out it’s entire search algorithm.

“PageRank is [still] all important part of how we determine when to crawl a page,” Cutts said. He added that link backs and participation in social media are also ways to improve search visibility.

What do you think? Will quality suffer for faster indexing?