Does it work?

Yes and no. As you may know Google provides info on how quickly your search took to run, in the top right of the page. From playing with the search I’ve found that in general yes, the new search is at least twice as fast (0.28s vs 0.13s) than the old however in some cases it was slower (0.23s vs 0.28s) – at least the first time round.

I think the new search may use some new form of caching to speed up query time. When I press the search button again the elapsed time dropped to 0.8 seconds. This doesn’t happen with the old search.

I searched for fairly obscure things such as “subversion conflict resolution” which given the few numbers of people who will have tried the new search (not many) probably means that not much has been cached yet. I’ll be trying the same searches tomorrow to see how long they take.

One thing to also bear in mind is how many people are using the new search? Quite a lot less than are using the standard one I’ll wager. That means there’s probably a lot less load on the new search system. At the same time though, how many servers are running the new vs old search?

I also think Google may have optimised the page itself for speed. It seemed noticeably faster when compared to the old page.

Why is Google doing this now?

With Bing rising in popularity (although still nowhere near Google’s dominant position) as well as Yahoo’s search now being powered by Bing, Google may be getting worried. This is likely to be their first attempt at fighting off their competition, some of which has been sorely needed for the last few years.

Don’t get me wrong, I think Google is the best search engine out there but when a company holds a monopoly like this it’ll all end in tears eventually.

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About the author

Jonathan Phillips is the founder and main author here on Division by Zero. A PHP developer by trade, Jonathan spends his days building and marketing websites and the rest of the time coming up with ideas for websites and businesses he hasn't got time to implement.