Has anyone considered that it may partially be marketing? Google knows the influence they hold over the web community. If they want to push the trend toward more optimized sites (which leads to a better experience for everyone) announcing policies like this is a good way to do so.

Also, by de-emphasizing slower sites I’m sure they can save — or at least better utilize — precious CPU cycles when spidering sites as well. Even lowering the request time-out threshold by fractions of a second could lead to sizable efficiency gains. Then there is the bandwidth play Ron mentioned.

Bottom line: Just continue to make clean, semantic, optimized sites. You’ll be fine.

The real dilemma is because internet access is still spreading out to emerging countries with poor connections, and even to developed countries by increased mobile usage. On top of that, existing users expect snappy web pages, where before they’d happily wait for this wonder the internet to load a page in a minute. Those three combined are the reasons speed matters, not this 1% SEO thing.

Google’s power over the internet does worry me though. We have seen how such power can hurt the internet [IE6].

The report is something along these lines:

On average, pages in your site take 3.2 seconds to load (updated on Apr 10, 2010). This is faster than 52% of sites.

I’d be very interested in how Google treats Flash and how about the case where there’s a graceful fallback?

The HTML version might be a perfect, standards-based, fast-loading HTML/CSS site, and this is what Google will see (and, I assume, use to measure a page’s loading time).

But the Flash version that is shown to most users might not be as fast-loading – it has all the bandwidth-heavy bells & whistles required by a multinational’s marketing department. The wrapper SWF that’s actually embedded on the page can be tiny, but is used to load heavier content in.

Will Google penalise a 50kB page with an embedded SWF that loads another 10MB of content, as opposed to a 300kb pure HTML/CSS/JS page? Hope so…

But now we shouldn’t forget everything we’ve been used to in the past 2-5 years. Styling a website for a better, a living experience of the web is still necessary. Using all damn gimmicks like some did in the late 90′s isn’t in any way helpful for evolving the web.

It’s simple – mobile web use is up and growing while mobile networks are notoriously saturated (iPhone especially). Small lean web sites are now in demand again for this reason, even if you’re pushing separate mobile versions from your “desktop” pages.

Faster is always better with any web page and often the optimizations pay off in reduced hosting costs and hopefully easier to edit source.

The point I’m making however, is that say for example flowers and gentle waterfall sounds in the page background gave better readings for blood pressure or perceived credibility – should this be taken into account when ranking results? Clearly no, and while this is ridiculous example, the same reasoning is at play.

I suppose my question is, that if a user responds more favourably to a certain operating environment, is this more important than the accuracy of the result? Googles move would indicate that they believe this “operating environment” further refines the accuracy of the result – but I’m not so sure.

Also I’m with you on that one Ron, there are other more commercial interests that could be at play here with Google, surely data/bandwidth is a very real factor in their bottom line.