In Search of… A better, faster, stronger Web

In Search of…
A better, faster, stronger Web
Marissa Mayer
VP Search & User Experience
Google
The importance of first impressions…
We didn’t have any webmasters…
And, I don’t do HTML.
Still simple, still fast…
4 Key Elements in a Search Experience
• 
• 
• 
• 
Comprehensiveness
Relevancy
User Experience
Speed
Back-end engineers committed to speed
1999: 30M web pages
Now: 10,000x
1999: 100K searches/day Now: 10,000x
Scale factor: 10,000 X 10,000 = 100M
Designing for Speed
10, 20, or 30 results?
30
/
•  User study participants unanimously wanted more
•  Data showed that people conducted
25% fewer searches
Avg Time
0.9s
0.4s
Control
Experiment
(10 results) (30 results)
Slowing down search
+ 0.400
0.73 seconds
•  Searches/user decreases by 0.44%
•  Dropped to 0.76% after six weeks
•  Users did 0.21% fewer searches, even after we
stopped injecting the delay
Speeding up Google
Google Reader
Google Reader
Reader latency across different browsers
Google Reader
Reader 7-day actives
Google Checkout
Google Checkout
Latency up 2% and…
Searches/user down 2%
Google Checkout
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<td valign=top><font class=a size=-1>www.nordstrom.com</font></td>
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Google News
Google News takes more than 8 seconds (!!!) to load
HTML tables… and their opposition to speed
Content above the fold loads in
under a second.
While remainder of page takes
8 seconds to complete…
More table tricks & the billion-dollar HTML tag
Chunked Encoding
<table align=right>
Billion $$ html tag
</table>
Google Maps
•  12% of Google Maps users access the Internet
using slow connections
Google Maps
Uncompressed
Compressed
0.53 of
of the
the original
original file
file size
size
Compressed map tiles and0.36
progressive
loading
yielded speed improvements of 2-3x
Google Maps
Increased panning with compressed tiles
Designing for speed
•  HTML wants to be square
•  Images 101:
–  Small images = $1.00
–  Big images = $1.01
•  Tables are purely evil
•  Compression is your friend
Speeding up the web
Designing for speed
http://code.google.com/speed
Browsing the web as quickly as a magazine
Faster browsers for newer web pages
Build…Design… and Prescribe for Speed
Q&A