While speed matters a lot, we have also seen some results we believe are overstated. In a Web 2.0 talk by Marissa Mayer, then at Google, she described an experiment where Google increased the number of search results on the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) from ten to thirty (Linden 2006). She claimed that traffic and revenue from Google searchers in the experimental group dropped by 20%. Her explanation? The page took half a second more to generate. Performance is a critical factor, but multiple factors were changed, and we suspect that the performance only accounts for a small percentage of
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