When the American elections were nearing the close I saw a headline on CNN that said that McCain had conceded flash by. I couldn't go to the snippet (it was video which my work computer isn't allowed to look at) so I Googled 'McCain Concedes' the first query got me two results from very obscure news sources outside of the US, I hit search again immediately and got three more hits including CNN and Fox etc. Hit search again and got screeds of results including the major news sources. In less than 30 seconds Google had managed to index a huge number of news articles as they got published. I was very impressed.

Perhaps with a lot of people having HN in Google Reader helps them index it a lot quicker (they don't really have to crawl, seeing how they're already fetching the feed fairly often). I notice updates to my personal blog will appear in google very fast (30 minutes).

Google observes how frequently a page updates, and refreshes frequently-updated pages more often than rarely-updated ones. I believe it also ranks new content higher than old content, all else equal, presumably to allow recent coverage of current events to show up even though it won't have many links to it (and thus low pagerank).

Google picks up blogs very quickly -- we get the same thing happenning at http://www.amahi.org