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Comment by dkubb | Hacker News Reader

I love that Google is focusing on how to speed up the web, but they are missing the most obvious thing they could do that would have a dramatic impact on the speed of the web:

Update their PageRank algorithm to take into account website speed, and then publish this as a fact.

The idea would be that they would have GoogleBot measure the latency, and overall page load time and rank sites higher that respond faster, and slow sites lower.

One of the problems with PageRank is that most of how they measure site quality is a mystery, but making it plain that speed is used in ranking would bring website performance to the front of everyone's minds. They could use similar metrics as YSlow and PageSpeed use, and tell everyone to optimize their sites using those tools as a starting point.

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This is a horrible idea. Yes, it would result in increased focus by some people on speed, but probably the same people who focus on "SEO". So now content relevancy has yet another adversary in the battle for SERPs. There's a LOT of really incredible, original content out there written by amazing people who do it in their spare time and don't give two shits about their SEO or the speed of their server, and now that content is going to slip further down the rankings because it takes 2 seconds to load instead of 100 ms? No thanks.

You are correct that SEO people would latch onto the idea and start producing faster sites. But so will many legitimate sites that want to provide a good user experience. Is that really so bad?

I think that site speed does correlate with a better user experience. A site that loads quickly shows that the person who made it cares about my experience more than a bloated site that takes forever to load.

I will admit that it's certainly not as as strong an indicator as the content, inbound links and other factors that are rumored to be part of PageRank but speed does matter. All other things being equal, I would much rather visit a site that loads in 2 seconds than one that loads in 20 seconds.

You wait 2 seconds for a page load? You're amazingly generous.

If google stopped ranking the most relevant content at the top, I would start using bing instead.

You better start using it, then. Be it an official part of pagerank, or some emergent property of their crawlers, I've seen very good evidence that page load speeds have strong influence on natural search rank.

Regardless, Google is doing this to push at the technical limitations on apps like GMail or Google Reader, not Joe Shmo's burger shop.

That was my thinking too. With PageRank Google is trying to find a way to measure the perceived quality of the user experience for each page. Except there's no way to do that directly, so they look at indirect methods, like counting the number of inbound links. This is just another indirect measurement to add to (what I'm sure is) hundreds of other factors they use to rank a site.

IMHO a site that cares about the user experience would have been optimized to load quickly.

Heck, even if Google told people speed was important, and didn't incorporate any speed measurements into PageRank, I think it would have a positive effect.

They already do that in a sense. Google's webmaster tools show you how quickly googlebot crawls your site, you can actually adjust it higher, but I'm sure their crawl recommendation is based upon how much the algorithm thinks your site can reasonably handle.

So, in theory, the faster your site responds, the more pages googlebot can crawl without crushing your servers, the more people find your site when searching, thus giving more people the opportunity to visit your site because it's fast.

Unless they want to make the web faster for their properties, which SPDY would do. They can only optimize their own sites up to a point and then they need to make the whole web infrastructure more efficient to realize any more speed gains, across all clients.

Except your network connection to a site is going to be drastically different than Google's. Case in point: My datacenter directly peers with Comcast, so I get <7ms pings from home. Google gets around 35ms.

It would be like comparing the drive to a particular location using completely different starting points.

Plus, people would start doing all sorts of tricks to boost their ranking. Serving static, cached files for Google and giving everyone else a slow, dynamic site. It's way too easy to abuse.

It's a challenge, but one that can be overcome.

Google just needs to figure out a reasonable baseline latency to subtract - for that, there's ping, ping the previous host on the route, latency to other hosts with close IPs, GeoIP+a database of baseline latency to sites in the same area etc.

And the tricks will be dealt with the same way as now: If you're caught doing them, you're blacklisted. But this will be less of an issue in this case: If you've taken the trouble to set up caches that you can direct Google to -- why not direct your actual users to that too?

But you're assuming location is all that matters. Certain network providers, no matter how close they are to you, just have shitty, overloaded networks.

The cache trick is that Google doesn't need to see dynamic content as much as the user does. Example: Any site that's based on user selection to determine customization. I might need to see recommended content that's based on a very complex algorithm that takes a while to generate the page. Whereas Google just needs to see a page. Cache for Google, generate from scratch for everyone else.

Googles crawlers are located all over the place, and especially for the latency score, they should hit the site from a few different locations, as well as different times of day.

The cache trick is the same for not-logged-in users as well as for Google. If you're showing the same page to more than one user (and you should be, for your not-logged-in users), you should cache it and show everyone that. If show Google a few hours old version (that you wouldn't want users to see) you'll be punished with the current rules.

If you're only showing content to logged-in users, Google can't see anything, anyway.

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