Internet users wont wait a second for results

Google discovers that For impatient web users,an eye blink is just too long to wait for a page to load

Listen to this article

00:00

1x 1.5x 1.8x

Wait a second. No,thats too long.

Remember when you were willing to wait a few seconds for a computer to respond to a click on a Web site or a tap on a keyboard? These days,even 400 milliseconds 8211; literally the blink of an eye 8211; is too long,as Google engineers have discovered. That barely perceptible delay causes people to search less.

Subconsciously,you dont like to wait, said Arvind Jain,a Google engineer,and the resident speed maestro. Every millisecond matters.

Google and other tech companies are on a new quest for speed,challenging the likes of Mr Jain to make fast go faster. The reason is that data-hungry smartphones and tablets are creating frustrating digital traffic jams,as people download maps,video clips of sports highlights,news updates or recommendations for nearby restaurants. The competition to be the quickest is fierce.

People will visit a Web site less often if it is slower than a close competitor by more than 250 milliseconds a millisecond is a thousandth of a second.

250 milliseconds,either slower or faster,is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web, said Harry Shum,a speed specialist at Microsoft.

The performance of Web sites varies,and so do Internet user expectations. A person will be more patient waiting for a video clip to load than for a search result. And sites constantly face trade-offs between visual richness and snappy response times. As entertainment and news sites,like The New York Times site,offer more video clips and interactive graphics,that can slow things down.

Story continues below this ad

But speed matters in every context,research shows. Four out of five online users will click away if a video stalls while loading. The major search engines,Google and Microsofts Bing,are the speed demons of the Web,analysts say,typically delivering results in less than a second.

In 2009,a study by Forrester Research found that online shoppers expected pages to load in two seconds or fewer 8211; and at three seconds,a large share abandon the site. Only three years earlier a similar Forrester study found the average expectations for page load times were four seconds or fewer.

The two-second rule is still often cited as a standard for Web commerce sites. Yet experts in human-computer interaction say that rule is outdated. The old two-second guideline has long been surpassed on the racetrack of Web expectations, said Eric Horvitz,a scientist at Microsofts research labs. nyt