When do search engines change their records?

[chandrika]

Hello,
I am watching the stats on a website and seeing the search engines come to spider the pages. They have just spidered alot of pages that were hitherto not spidered and I wondered how long after they spider a site do the changes come into effect with regard to page position?

Is it an immediate thing as each page is spidered their records change realtime or do they take some time after the spider has been before the new pages are taken into account in the search results?

So far I have not noticed a change in results, but the yahoo and msn spiders seem to be still spidering, a little at a time, I just want to know whether I should face facts now that the new pages were no use to the se, or whether there is still some hope that they may be?

My day depends on it it, whether to be hopeless today or full of anticipation? Right now I'm in limbo ;)

[thebloke]

Now, there's a question.

I was about to post a sort of related question so I'll chip in here as it may be of use.

I had lot of log files on my web server so to save space I archived them off. I noticed that when I did this, Google's cache of the site updated the next day. I thought it may have been a co-incidence however the next time I made a change to the site I archived off the log files. Sure enough, the next day Goog had updated it's cache.

I've now done this every time I've made a change to the site and each time this update has happened.

Has anyone else experienced this and is this something we should be doing if we want our changes to be picked up quicker?