Google seeks speedier web

Posted on 16 Nov 2009 at 13:21

Google is developing a system designed to make the web run twice as fast.

Internal tests on the technology that it has named SPDY (pronounced ?€speedy?€) have shown pages loading more twice as quickly as they do in the real world, software engineers Mike Belshe and Roberto Peon reveal.

?€The initial results are very encouraging: when we download the top 25 websites over simulated home network connections, we see a significant improvement in performance?€"pages loaded up to 55% faster,?€ they wrote on the Google Chromium blog.

Google plans to make the software available soon as an open source project, alongside a modified version of its Chrome web browser that is capable of handling both the established HTTP and experimental SPDY protocols.

Google has also said that in future it will consider the speed of a web page?€"as well as its content?€"when ranking pages in its search results.

Matt Cutts, who works for Google?€s web spam team, told a conference in Las Vegas that load speed will be factored into page ranking as one of the 200 plus criteria that the company uses to determine the ranking.

Cutts said that change is designed to make it quicker for Google users to go through search results.

Author: Simon Aughton / Simon Edwards

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