Google to highlight Web's need for speed

Few would disagree that faster is better when it comes to the Web, and Google wants to get Web publishers hooked on speed.

Webmasters looking for ways to speed up page loading times will have a host of tips and tricks to peruse later Tuesday when Google launches a new Web site designed to emphasize the importance of speed on the Web, said Richard Rabbat, a product manager at Google. Google engineering gurus Bill Coughran and Urs Hoelzle plan to unveil the initiative in a blog post unveiling tutorials and position statements on topics near and dear to Google's heart, and company executives will be talking about speed all week at the Velocity conference in San Jose.

Google has already spent a great deal of time over the last year or so evangelizing technologies such as HTML 5 and JavaScript, pointing toward those improvements as a way of making the Web faster and more enjoyable. Speed has long been a primary goal of Google's search engine, with the company often boasting--in contrast to most Internet companies--that Google's goal is to get you onto and off of its domain as fast as possible.

Now the company wants to share some of what it's learned with the outside world. Rabbat noted a recent experiment by a Google engineer in which the Google experience was slowed for a small number of visitors; predictably, they were less likely to come back. Google has already started to help Web publishers test their sites for stragglers with a Firefox plug-in called PageSpeed, something that Yahoo has also done with YSlow.

In addition to the focus on modernizing protocols through its work on HTML 5, Google also plans to devote a section of this new page calling on governments around the world to improve access to broadband Internet connections.