Google search results Pre-loading interpretation: Judging based on historical data

July 5 Afternoon news, Google launched the instant page (Instant pages) technology, to the user's search results preload, reduce the total time spent searching 2-5 seconds. In this connection, Google product manager Richard Rabbat, in his communication with Sina Technology, said the technology was based primarily on previous cumulative historical data.

Google announced the launch of the Insider search conference before announcing the introduction of new features such as instant pages. It is said that in the case of opening the Instant page function, the user clicks on the Google search result, can "load the website's picture and the text almost without delay", is not affected by the new webpage load time.

This can be done because Google has preloaded the search results page. According to current principles, once the Instant page feature is enabled, the page in the first item of the search results is preloaded in the background and only the first result is preloaded. And it takes a certain condition to trigger the instant page function.

"Proper preload of search results is a challenging issue," said Richard Rabbat, who misjudged the results of users ' upcoming clicks, which would create a waste of computer resources such as bandwidth. Therefore, the Preload feature is enabled only when Google considers it to be full.

According to the introduction, Google's judgment is based mainly on the cumulative historical data.

Although the current page functionality is only available in the development version of Google Chrome, it will appear in the beta release, says Richard Rabbat. As planned, this feature will soon be integrated into the stable version of the Chrome browser. This service can also be used by ordinary users.

The development of instant page technology is a team within Google that is called "make the Web Faster" (faster Web pages). The team focuses on improving the performance of Google products, especially in search, and also involves the development of applications such as Picasa, Google Docs, etc. (Shu Shi)

　　The following is a transcript of the dialogue between Sina Technology and Richard Rabbat:

Sina Technology: This release of instant pages of new technology, when will be applied, in search results will have a special message?

Richard Rabbat: At the moment, this feature can only be used in the development version of Google Chrome, the future will be released in the beta version, in the later release of the stable version, users can also use.

Sina Science and Technology: Why instant page only preload the first search results? What criteria do we judge to preload that result? What is the biggest technical difficulty?

Richard Rabbat: Proper preload of search results is a challenging issue because if you misjudge the results of a user's upcoming clicks, the computer's resources, including bandwidth, will be consumed when the user clicks on another result. Only when we have a full grasp of the user's next click, Google.com is preloaded, based on our judgment of the cumulative historical data. In the actual experiment, even if there are occasionally a few misjudged cases, we also see that this function for the user to bring a significant increase in speed.

In the Chrome browser, we are very careful not to allow preload to slow down the user's computer. For example, we now preload only one page at a time, and preload is only a minor priority option.

Sina Technology: Can you introduce the development background of this technology?

Richard Rabbat: In fact, the concept of prefetching is not new, it is part of the HTML5 standard of the consortium. Although Google is currently the only major search engine to use this feature, any Web site can use Chrome to activate the preload feature.

Sina Technology: Please briefly introduce the situation of make the Web faster team.

Richard Rabbat: This team is made up of many engineers with extensive experience in the performance and speed of Web site infrastructure, or in the development of Web applications. They are typical engineers who like to optimize and are particularly excited about winning every millisecond. The team is led by Arvind Jain, a senior engineering director who builds and leads the team.

The team works in different offices in Google and meets each year in depth to explore their ideas, share experiences, and discuss future directions. They focus on specific and improved technologies that can improve the performance of Google products, especially in search technologies, and include many Google-developed applications such as Picasa and Google Docs.

Sina technology: You are from what aspects to improve the speed of the network, what are the specific methods?

Richard Rabbat: We consider how to improve the speed of the network from different angles and directions, as follows:

1 Infrastructure: Our team first improves the speed of the Internet by improving the underlying network protocols, including TCP/IP, HTML, and DNS. These network protocols existed many years ago, and now we are trying to improve them to accommodate a richer network environment and faster bandwidth.

2 Developer side: Best practices will help webmasters improve the browsing speed of their sites by optimizing content, caching of content, and speed of delivery, such as compressing content through a Web server, improving the size of images on Web pages, and inserting JavaScript that does not block page content.

3 Client side: Our team is working closely with the Google Chrome browser team and other browser teams, and we are committed to speeding up the loading of the pages by adding new features to the HTML5, including the ability to measure the time it takes to load a Web page, to prefetch the functionality of the Web content, and the ability to load other objects on the page at the same time asynchronously loading the code.

In addition, our team has created a new picture format, WebP, which saves about 30% of the size of JPEG images of comparable quality, thereby reducing the number of bytes that need to be loaded.

4 Server aspect: Our team has developed an optimization technology for Apache HTTP server to optimize the Web pages provided by the Apache HTTP server to the browser.

5 Promotion of advertising speed: Our team continues to improve the loading speed of online advertising, as well as Google Analytics, because it often appears in third-party websites, so we want to try to improve its speed.

Sina Science and Technology: At present, what are your team's products in the research and development? What is the most obvious effect of speed-up in the products that have been launched?

Richard Rabbat: At present, our team is engaged in the main products are:

1 Google Public dns:google Public DNS enables faster and more stable Internet experience by increasing DNS resolution.

2 asynchronous Google Analytics:google Analytics version, you can load other elements of the page while loading Google Analytics code, so this process does not make the page load slower.

3 asynchronous AdSense: Similar to Google Analytics, it can load AdSense ads at the same time without affecting the Publisher's Web page load speed.

4 page Speed:page Speed is an open-source firefox/chrome developer tool that site administrators and Web developers can use page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and get advice. Page Speed can also perform several tests on the Web server configuration and front-end code for the site, based on a set of best practices that are known to enhance Web page performance, the site administrator who runs page Speed on a webpage gets a set of scores for each page and useful advice on how to improve the performance of the Web page.

5 Mod_pagespeed: This module is part of the Apache HTTP server, which helps increase page loading by 20% to 60% by checking the Web pages being serviced and optimizing their operation.

6) WebP: A new picture format that can save about 30% of the size of a JPEG image of equivalent quality, thereby reducing the number of bytes that need to be loaded. Now opera and Google Chrome browsers have supported the image format, and applications like Picasa and AppEngine also support WEBP.

Sina technology: With the speed of faster, you have developed the meaning of the technology is how much? In the future, what is the direction of improvement, and how much space?

Richard Rabbat: At present, the Internet has a basic "Internet pipeline", including fiber-optic to the user and other technologies to ensure that users enjoy high-speed network, but that speed is only when we maximize the pipeline, users can realize. Now, the browser spends a lot of time waiting to complete a download before downloading other related content. On the other hand, with the advent of wireless technologies such as 3G and 4G, bandwidth is still tight, and developers must ensure that the best practices are implemented to benefit users in different connection states. Our team is paying close attention to the phenomenal growth of wireless and mobile, and the speed of the web is a good example of how to improve the mobile Internet experience. You can expect that Google will bring more products to help mobile internet users have a fast Internet experience.