I am aware of how the original Cache works, but the reasoning behind my cache lies mainly in the fact that I am using Hibernate in a read only way meaning that all database changes are done outside of the Hibernate Eventing System so using the main Hibernate-Cache would mean that I will definitely end up with wrong data at some point. For a Search-Page that would be totally fine, but for highly relevant sites like a detail page for an article has to be up-to-date.

Basically what I am doing in my application with my hack is: Cache the search-page and check for changes in the database every 15 minutes.