New Google study on speed in search results

Googler Jake Brutlag recently published a short study, "Speed Matters for Google Web Search" (PDF), which looked at how important it is to deliver and render search result pages quickly.

Specifically, Jake added very small delays (100-400ms) to the time to serve and render Google search results. He observed that even these tiny delays, which are low enough to be difficult for users to perceive, resulted in measurable drops in searches per user (declines of -0.2% to -0.6%).

Please see also my Nov 2006 post, "Marissa Mayer at Web 2.0", which summarizes a claim by Googler Marissa Mayer that Google saw a 20% drop in revenue from an accidentally introduced 500ms delay.

Update: To add to the Marissa Mayer report above, Drupal's Dries Buytaert summarized the results of a few A/B tests at Amazon, Google, and Yahoo on the impact of speed on user satisfaction. As Dries says, "Long story short: even the smallest delay kills user satisfaction."

Update: In the comments, people are asking why the effect in this study oddly appears to be an order of magnitude lower than the effects seen in previous tests. Good question there.

Update: By the way, this study is part of a broader suite of tools and tutorials Google has gathered as part of an effort to "make the web faster".