Make Google your Homepage?

[Marcia]

Now showing on www2

[www2.google.com...]

[nativenewyorker]

This is new? I could swear that I've seen it for awhile. In any event, it is on the main www.google hub already.

Ted

[4eyes]

I'm not seeing it

must be geo-specific

[lorax]

Marcia, what did you see that we're not?

[kyr01]

Make Google Your Homepage!

Is also on google.it, right now ('Scegli Google come pagina iniziale!')

[Marcia]

...what kyr01 said is what I'm seeing. Even now, not on www but on www2. Google is my homepage, in fact here and there I throw in a little nagging; I'd love a personalized start page. Google's got whatever's needed for one without it taking 5 minutes to load and no turning popups loose.

I was wondering if everyone's seeing it, and also what they might have in mind.

[rfgdxm1]

I could also swear seeing this on Google before.

[AndyCyberAVS]

As far as I know that is on all of the servers, but it does a check to see if google is your homepage, and if it is, it doesn't display the link at all..

Nice bit of code, you should have a look.

Andy

[edited by: Marcia at 5:23 am (utc) on Mar. 23, 2003]
[edit reason] No sigs, please. [/edit]

[Powdork]

It is not on the cache for Google's home page and that was taken on March 22 (eqarlier today or yesterday). It was also not there in December 2002 according to webdev.archive.org. Interestingly, the pages indexed in dec 2002 and today are the same.

[GoogleGuy]

I think it's something we mention every once in a while, like the toolbar. Neat that we do it in other languages though. :)

[mat_bastian]

you should leave it up full time, it saves an extra step for me if I happen to get it switched while perusing the darker underbelly of the web.

[daroz]

you should leave it up full time

I did a QUICK count... It takes about 292 characters (give or take 5-6) to do this neat trick. The total page size, as IE reports it is 3,705 bytes. A roughly 7.8% page size increase.

If 1/5th of google's 150 Million searches a day hit the homepage at least once that's 30,000,000 page views. 30M * 292 == 8.1GB/day

On a T1 you can send 16,588,800,000 bytes per day, theoritical maximum. (It's actually a double-digit percentage less, 10-12 for overhead, but who's counting :) )

So to do this 'neat trick', with my math, Google uses another 1/2 a T1 each day -- JUST for the "Make Google My Homepage" link. Ouch.

(Disclaimer: My guesstimates could be wrong, but I'd be happy to be enlightened by GG :)

[mat_bastian]

staggering numbers....:¦

[minivip]

Google uses clever compression techniques like crunching and gzipping. Crunching is obvious when viewing the html source. Gzipping not, it happens nearly invisible to the customers. Though I don't know the percentage of gzipped versus nonzipped content (would like to know :) it will make quite a big difference under a bandwith point of view.
Therefore I made a copy of googles index-page, placed it at our mod_gzip-enabled server and checked the delivered page sizes. Additionally I removed round about 250 bytes responsible for the bookmark-script and placed it at the server too. Here are the results:

google.html original size 3731 compressed size 1344
google1.html original size 3484 compressed size 1247

Hence by usage of zipped content instead of 247 bytes there are only 97 bytes of additional charge.

Allthough there may be some small differences in gzip-implementation and compression ratio between my testserver and google I believe that this results are quite accurate. So the amount of additional charge is a lot smaller than you may normally think (but depends on the distribution of delivered zipped/unzipped content).

One additional remark. If Google wants to compensate the additional load they could reduce the size of their logo. This would be possible with nearly no visible quality reduction - I guess one ore two kilobytes are possible. But due to chaching issues it's hard to predict the savings. And as long as they celebrate anniversaries, birthdays or holidays (I love it) with their logos I am sure that in this case cost saving is not the limiting factor ;-)

And has anybody checked the google-logo at the result-pages? Or the logos at the international homepages. You will recognize that the logo is made up by 4 images.

Yes - Google is "the" major player in "Web Site Optimization"!

[daroz]

I don't believe GZip compression is enabled with Google's webservers. I can't get it to send me a compressed page.

Either way my point is that with the volume of pages Google serves in a day even a small change to the pages can result in a non-trivial traffic increase.

[minivip]

> I don't believe GZip compression is enabled with Google's webservers.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2003 23:38:57 GMT
Cache-control: private
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Encoding: gzip
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Server: GWS/2.0

I get this response. As far as I have seen Google uses gzip-compression since 13. Feb. 2002. But they used it earlier - the toolbar responses had been zipped first.

>I can't get it to send me a compressed page.

Perhaps you use Netscape or something similar?

> Either way my point is that with the volume of pages Google serves in a day even a small change to the pages can result in a non-trivial traffic increase.

Yes, you are totally right. I just mentioned zipping in order to point out the ingenuity of the google team :)