Story from Mercury News
Google shared one of the closely guarded secrets of its success with a roomful of developers this morning, revealing the tricks it uses to get Web pages to load in less than a second.
At Google Its All About Speed
"We really think that if the Web gets better and the Web gets faster it is good for everyone," Marissa Mayer, a vice president of search products, told attendees of the O'Reilly Velocity Conference. From its launch in 1998, Google distinguished itself from competitors with a focus on speed. While Excite and Yahoo weighed down their home pages by turning them into massive portals, Google's page featured mostly white space.For years, Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, has joked that the reason was he refused to learn HTML, a computer language used to design Web pages. But there was another important motivation: White space loaded instantaneously. When Mayer started working at the search engine 10 years ago, she recalled, her boss closely monitored her code to make sure that she didn't add a single extraneous byte of data.
As Google grew, the number of Internet searches its computers conducted from several hundred thousand in 1999 to several billion in 2009. Speed became more important than ever. The home page was pared down and new products were vetted in a "latency lab" that measured how long a user would be forced to wait. The results sometimes led to surprising decisions. When Google launched an online payments system in 2006 called Google Checkout, engineers were instructed to render the blue shopping cart, which was the site's identifying icon, in painstaking HTML.
It was as if a newspaper, which use computers to produce each day's edition, had reverted to hot-type technology, which used massive machines to set type in a painstaking process. "Who would have thought that this big blob of HTML would load faster," Mayer said. "But the latency lab showed that it did."
It turns out that a delay as short of the blink of an eye — about 400 milliseconds — could turn users off. Last year, Mayer said, Google experimented by injecting a 400 millisecond delay into its delivery of search results. Searches per user started dropping. After six weeks, searches per user had fallen nearly 1 percent. That seemingly small figure represented several hundred million dollars a year in potential ad revenue, Mayer noted.
Mayer said Google has started sharing tips for speeding up Web pages, because it believes the faster the Web becomes the more people will ultimately use it — and use Google. In July 2009 Google unveiled a new Web site it had created for developers containing tutorials and performance tools. "Many Web sites can become faster with little effort, and collective attention to performance can speed up the entire Web," senior vice presidents Urs Hoelzle and Bill Coughran wrote in a blog post.
Click Here For More Information on Google SEO
