londrum - 2:20 pm on Nov 19, 2009 (gmt 0)

The study suggested a longer page load time resulted in decreased visitor satisfaction.

i can understand that in relation to google's search page, because people basically just come for the results. so the quicker they appear the better.
but i don't think you can apply the same rule to every site out there. people will quite happily wait for an extra second or two if they know what's coming. how many of us long-time users would desert webmasterworld if it suddenly started taking one second longer to load? probably none of us, but presumably it would suffer a hit to its rankings.