Google has been pushing everything on the web to be faster, faster. Is this all for the greater good? Or does Google have a more self-serving intention?
Google’s need for speed boils down to one very simple thing: money. It realized long ago that every millisecond improvement in pageload times on its search engine resulted in more searches, and thus more search ads served and clicked on. The opposite is also true. Google once did a study
showing that delays of 100 to 400 millisecond in showing search results translated into up to 0.6 percent searches. Multiply that across the billions of searches done on Google and it starts to add up to real money, perhaps tens of millions of dollars per quarter. – Google’s Need For Speed Is About Making You Search More (TechCrunch)
Fast Apps. Fast Browser. Faster web standards. Faster Pipes (Fiber). The list goes on and on. Google is obsessed with speed. At first glance this may just look like do-gooding, but, in reality, Google has a business need for a faster web. The faster web pages load, the more pages you can view. The more pages you view, the more ads you have a chance of seeing. The faster searching is, the more searches you can do. All this breaks down to ad revenue.
While a page that loads a few milliseconds faster may not make a lot of difference, if you multiply that across the billions of pages and searches Google serves, it quickly adds up. Google has optimized speed across it’s own properties, but it will soon be requiring site owners to speed up their sites as well (site speed is rumored to play a larger role in SEO in the near future according to Google’s Matt Cutts). To help site owners optimize their sites for speed, Google has open sourced their Page Speed tool.
Google’s quest for speed does benefit consumers – at least for now. Time will tell how site speed ends up influencing search engine rankings. Hopefully the smaller guys, who don’t have the large data centers and dedicated programmers, won’t be too disadvantaged. Or we may lose out on the diversity of information and viewpoints that the web has to offer.
What do you think about Google’s need for speed?
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