londrum - 8:49 pm on Nov 8, 2010 (gmt 0)

It's the storage and indexing that is a big deal, and your page speed has no effect on that major chunk

how many of us took a look at our page weight when we found out that google was looking at page speed? pretty much all of us, i reckon. most people (and most beginners, who cant do the more technical stuff) start by offloading css and javascript to external files, condensing whitespace, and all that kind of easy, takes-two-seconds stuff, when someone tells them their page is slow. multiply that by a billion for all the pages on the web, and repeat every day, and thats going to save google a packet of money in expenses.

the whole "we only use it in a draw" thing just sounds silly to me. how many times do sites draw? their algo contains how many different pointers.. 400+, is it? sites these days can have thousands of backlinks, 1000s of visitors, and infinite varities of bounce rates, internal links, site sizes, on-page text... the chances of two sites being close enough to need a tie-breaker are so remote that google aren't going to introduce and develop all these new speed tools just so they can split 2 sites that might appear on page 10 of the serps, which no one is going to visit anyway. there's not enough in it for them. its more to do with how much money it saves them to speed our sites up.
saying its part of the algo is the carrot that makes us do it.