Speed Thrills and Slow Speed Chills
February 5, 2009
A happy quack who sent me a link to Geeking with Greg’s November 9, 206, item about speed and user behavior. You can review the article here. For me, the most interesting point in this three year young write up was this comment:
Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.
I spent a day looking at various online search systems. My reaction was that some of the sites took far too long to render results. I was using a high speed Internet connection in a big company that does advanced technology for a living. The network latency could have been a factor, but I was running test queries throughout the day. Some sites were slow.
Speed is a big deal for me. If Ms. Meyer’s data are correct, slow systems drive users away. Here are some general thoughts about my experience over the last eight hours on non stop testing.
- Yahoo mail and search from “ying” was consistently slow. I wonder if firing the PR person will address the severe latency within Yahoo’s subsystems
- Microsoft Live.com search was faster on popular search topics like Spears, American Idol, etc. Google was milliseconds slower on these queries. I think Microsoft is caching lots of popular searches and probably paying dearly for this approach.
- Google was consistently quick. Even when running infrequent queries on topics like emergency core cooling system and Boolean queries on Books, Google was snappy–consistently.
- Metasearch systems, particularly Ixquick.com, were snappy.
There were many piggies. Government sites were particularly annoying.
The conclusion I drew is that site unfortunate enough to respond in a sluggish manner from the point of view of the user will lose users. Next week I will highlight a high performance search system. I plan to allow vendors to index a specific corpus so visitors to this Web log can run head to head search system comparisons. You can judge for yourself how speed affects your perception of a search system. If you have search system and want to participate in this head to head projects, watch for details next week,
Stephen Arnold, February 5, 009
Stephen Arnold, February 5, 2009
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One source to go for specific city and country isp and download speeds globally is Pando Networks.