Google's speed need: 'instantaneous Internet'
TECHNOLOGY Google wants Internet to be instantaneous, which would attract more users - not to mention money
By James Temple
Published 4:00 am PDT, Sunday, October 3, 2010
In late 2007, Google engineers set out to test a hunch.
For about a million oblivious users, the company throttled back the delivery of search results by 100 to 400 milliseconds for several weeks. Less than half a second is barely perceptible, but the results were unmistakable.
Use of the search engine dropped by 0.2 to 0.6 percent on average during the experiment, worsening as it went on.
If 0.6 percent sounds trivial, consider this: Had search advertising dropped off commensurately, and there's every reason to believe it would have, the delay would have cost Google about $900 million in revenue last year.
The lesson: Speed matters. A lot.
That's why the Mountain View company is dedicating huge resources to an audacious goal: the instantaneous Internet, an experience every bit as immediate as traditional media.
"Browsing should actually feel like flipping the pages of a magazine," said Bill Coughran, senior vice president of engineering at Google. "The Web, in general, is very far away from that."
Google believes that the more it can turbocharge its products, and the Internet itself, the more people will search, surf, watch videos, download music and engage in other activities that will become possible as the Web breaks new speed barriers. (Massive multiplayer holographic video games anyone?)
Google is by no means the only company promoting a faster Web, but as the dominant Internet business, it's using its industry clout and bank account to goad webmasters, Internet service providers and even users to tighten the nuts and bolts of today's Internet, and to think big about tomorrow's.
"Other companies maybe pay lip service to this, but they don't take it to the lengths that Google takes it," said Ray Valdes, an analyst with Gartner. "Their view is that if the Web wins, Google wins."
There are considerable challenges, however, to accelerating overall online speeds in meaningful ways. In fact, by some measures, the United States isn't even making much progress.
The capacity of average Internet connections has increased by more than 74 times since 1996 in the United States, as more and more people upgraded from dial-up to DSL or cable, according to research by Aptimize, which creates software to improve website speed.
But consider a site like White house.gov. During that same time period, as the once simple site was loaded down with pictures and graphics, its size swelled by 54 times.
For the end user, the experience might be more enjoyable and informative, but it isn't appreciably faster.
Once broadband customers outstripped dial-up users, "Website developers suddenly said, 'We're free. We don't have to worry about developing pages that have to load fast,' " said Ed Robinson, chief executive of Aptimize.
It doesn't help that the Internet highways are particularly shoddy in the United States. In the first quarter, the average connection speed was 4.7 megabits per second, ranking 16th globally. South Korea led the list with rates more than twice that.
'Circle of life'
When Ben Gomes, a distinguished engineer at Google, joined the company in 1999, certain queries nearly stumped the search engine. The term "circle of life," for instance, took more than 10 seconds to generate results.
Today, the same search takes around 0.15 second.
Such improvements are the result of enormous hardware investments and thousands of improvements to the search tool. Google made more than 550 tweaks last year alone, most designed to improve the understanding of user intent.
The more the search engine can extract meaning from human language, as opposed to simply matching keywords, the more on target its results become. And that's a huge factor in speed: If a user has to search twice, or click to a second page of results, it can easily double the process.
Google addressed a second major choke point in the search process early last month, when it introduced Google Instant. The feature predicts what users are looking for as they type, switching the search results below with each new character entered. The company expects it could shave up to five seconds off the nine that users, on average, spend keying in a query.
These sorts of improvements mean users can accomplish more in less time, and will probably spend additional time logged on because the experience is more productive and fun, Gomes said.
"When a process becomes fluid you want to do it more; it becomes more pleasurable," he said.
That's caused a number of delays, including the 2008 launch of Google Suggest, a precursor to Instant that shows words or phrases users might be looking for before they're done typing. The auto-complete feature slowed down the search engine in tests, until engineers found ways to cut the code size in half.
Ultimately, however, the goal of an instantaneous Internet requires changes that can't occur inside of Google. It demands fatter pipes, improvements to the underlying network technology and better designed websites.
A Federal Communications Commission survey released in June found that 91 percent of home broadband users were "very" or "somewhat" satisfied with their service's speed. That begs the question: Why should sites and broadband providers invest to accelerate services?
The answer, according to Google and others, is that satisfaction is tightly linked to expectations. If it's as fast as users expect it to be, they feel like it's fast enough. But if it's even slightly slower, they can become outraged.
For instance, if TVs suddenly took fives seconds to change channels, many people would be on the phone yelling at their cable operator. But they give what is often the same company a pass when it takes about the same time for a Web page to load.
"That's fundamentally limiting the Internet, and we want to change that," said Arvind Jain, engineering director at Google.
People were happy with manual typewriters until the electric version was invented, just as they were generally content with dial-up until they wanted to download graphics, music and videos.
The best way to raise expectations again, and put consumer pressure on ISPs to build faster networks, is by demonstrating what becomes possible with significantly higher speeds, Jain said.
That's the driving philosophy behind Google's experimental fiber-to-the-home project. The company committed to build broadband networks as much as 100 times faster than most cable and DSL services in trial locations. Google, which plans to announce the chosen communities this year, said the 1-gigabit-per-second connections will enable far more data-intensive applications online, and could compel more ISPs to build similar networks.
Goading
Stimulating the construction of ultra-high-speed networks is, of course, a long-term plan. In the nearer term, Google is focused on the myriad ways that more efficiency can be wrung out of today's networks.
The company built its own zippy Web browser, Chrome, which helped push other companies to offer similarly faster software.
It has dedicated teams of engineers to work on Web protocols, modernizing information delivery methods designed for the predominantly text-based Web of long ago.
Finally, it made speed a component of relevance in search ranking, providing additional incentive for Web publishers to look hard at the design of their sites. The company also offered tools to help test and improve them.
But not everyone has looked fondly upon all of Google's efforts.
Outspoken company critic Scott Cleland, a blogger whose customers include large Google competitors, alleges that the use of speed in search ranking is anti-competitive. It forces other businesses to do things that benefit Google, he wrote.
ISPs have fought against efforts supported by Google to enact network neutrality rules, which would prevent networks from throttling back speeds for certain types of online applications, like video and file sharing. The companies contend that bandwidth hogs scarf down enormous portions of network capacity, and that they need to be able to adequately manage traffic, spam and malware.
On the other hand, net neutrality proponents pounced on Google for recently striking a compromise agreement with Verizon to advance a set of open Internet regulations that would largely exclude wireless services.
The conflicts underscore some of the key challenges that Google faces in its quest for an instantaneous Internet: Unlike cable or a magazine, the Web is a huge, decentralized network that no single body can oversee.
So for the foreseeable future, the Internet is likely to reflect that, as a patchwork of sites, networks and applications of highly varying quality and speed.
"I don't think (an instantaneous Internet) is, practically speaking, an achievable goal," Gartner analyst Valdes said. "But it's a goal worth pursuing, and benefits will come along the way to users and to Google."