The Line of Code That Was Worth A Billion Dollars To Google
on Jun 24, 2009 - 12:06 PM PST
One of the most surprising lessons James Hong of HOTorNOT taught when he came to Mixergy was that simply increasing his site’s speed helped him grow his sales. (Watch more from James on Mixergy.)
For Google, increasing speed was worth a billion, according to Data Center Knowledge:
This phenomenon is best illustrated by a single design tweak to the Google search results page in 2000 that [Marissa VP of Search and User Experience at Google] calls “The Billion Dollar HTML Tag.” Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page asked Mayer to assess the impact of adding a column of text ads in the right-hand column of the results page. Could this design, which at the time required an HTML table, be implemented without the slower page load time often associated with tables?
Mayer consulted the W3C HTML specs and found a tag (the “align=right” table attribute) that would allow the right-hand table to load before the search results, adding a revenue stream that has been critical to Google’s financial success.
The article is worth reading. There are other great examples in it of how increasing Google’s speed affects the overall business.
I’m having some speed issues with Mixergy.com right now, so this message is especially important to me.
Related: How HOTorNOT Bootstrapped To Over $5 Million In Annual Profits – With James Hong
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June 24th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
OK, this was totally over my head :(
June 24th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
[...] The Line of Code That Was Worth A Billion Dollars To Google http://mixergy.com/google-billion-spee/ [...]
June 24th, 2009 at 7:25 pm
OK, this was totally over my head :(
June 24th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Latency, Spam, Memory Leaks – Google What Are Ya Doing To Me Pal?…
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The following was reported today on the website Data Center Knowledge:
“It’s clear that latency really does matter to users,” said Mayer, the VP of Search and User Experience at Google and today’s ……