Alfa Jango Blog Engineering, Software, and Entrepreneurship

Google Instant Search is here, and over the last couple days there has been much hurrah about the sites that Google now loads directly into the results as you type, even after you’ve only typed in a single letter. Fast Company and Mashable have written about it. And before them, the Huffington Post wrote about it. And eight months before that, this little blog wrote about it. (By the way, the Huffington Post was nice enough to link back to us, so hats off to them!)

If you’re interested, check out Google One-letter Suggestions, where we analyzed the first 10 results for each letter (unlike these other publications who only look at the first result) and found some interesting trends back in December.

You see, these instant suggestions have been around for the better part of the year, before Google introduced Instant Search. Instead of loading the pages instantly as you typed though, it merely suggested search terms as you typed. In a way, Instant Search is actually the second step in a gradual release. The first step (the search term suggestions) meant you didn’t have to finish typing your search query, and the second step takes it just one step further, eliminating the need to hit ‘Enter’.

But what I really want to bring up is something I can’t believe none of the other major publications picked up on. This is the thing that I found the most interesting out of the entire analysis. If you type the letter “w” into Google, one of your top ten search suggestions is Facebook! Facebook? Yes, apparently enough people type “www.facebook.com” into Google that Facebook is a top-ten result for the letter “w”.

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Page load speed is becoming increasingly important as rich web applications become more interactive. It’s not just about usability anymore; it can now directly affect your placement in search engine results, now that Google uses page load speed in their ranking algorithm. Are you ready for a reality check? Get Google Webmaster Tools for your site, and go to the Labs >> Site Performance to view your average page load time, as seen by Google’s web crawlers. That’s right, Google is already tracking your site’s performance history.

Google Webmaster Tools is even kind enough to tell you how you stack up against the rest of the web. Here is what Webmaster Tools had to say about one of our sites before optimizing it for quick page loading:

On average, pages in your site take 4.5 seconds to load (updated on Feb 21, 2010). This is slower than 70% of sites. These estimates are of low accuracy (fewer than 100 data points). The chart below shows how your site’s average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times.

Ouch. Did I mention this would be a painful reality check?

Now to be fair, there’s a very reasonable explanation for this. Google claims that the majority of users will click “back” to the search results page if a link takes too long to load. So, if a webpage is too slow for the visitor to read it, the relevance of the content is…well, irrelevant. I should point out, however, that it’s unknown precisely how much page load speed affects your placement in search results.

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