At the Web 2.0 Summit Marissa Mayer, one of Google's top executives, told attendees that speed was the critical driver of Web 2.0. According to Zdnet:
In testing out the user interface for Google search, Mayer said that
with more results for a query, users were spending less time on the
site. It turned out that the cause wasn't just the paradox of
choice–paralyzed by too many choices–but the fact that a page with 10
results was half a second faster that the page with 30 results. So,
Google set about making the page with more results faster, and the rest
is history.
And here's an amazing fact:
Part of Google's secret sauce is that a round trip for a search query
that returns a result in .05 seconds touches 300 to 700 Google machines
across the country, Mayer said. "Users really respond to speed," she
said.
And on Google Maps:
When the Google Maps home page was put on a diet, shrunk from 100K to
about 70K to 80K, traffic was up 10 percent the first week and in the
following three weeks, 25 percent more, she said.
