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TheMadScientist - 5:12 am on Nov 18, 2009 (gmt 0)
That's not what the numbers Google shared say: ... Our experiments demonstrate that slowing down the search results page by 100 to 400 milliseconds has a measurable impact on the number of searches per user of -0.2% to -0.6% (averaged over four or six weeks depending on the experiment). ... Similarly, users exposed to a 400 ms delay since the beginning of the experiment did 0.44% fewer searches during the first three weeks, but 0.76% fewer searches during the second three weeks. They slowed result delivery time down by less than half a second and at the end of 3 weeks lost nearly one percent of the searches regularly conducted... I'm in the speed matters crowd personally.
Indeed, it doesn't matter that much. Most people are happy with a second or two wait: in my experience that is commonplace anyway. So google gets upset if it takes a few hundred milliseconds: that's THEIR problem not ours. The REAL visitors are quite content. At Google, we've gathered hard data to reinforce our intuition that "speed matters" on the Internet. Google runs experiments on the search results page to understand and improve the search experience.