"Speeding up websites is important - not just to site owners, but
to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we've
seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly,
visitors spend less time there. But faster sites don't just improve
user experience; recent data shows that improving site speed also
reduces operating costs. Like us, our users place a lot of value
in speed - that's why we've decided to take site speed into account
in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the
speed of a site relative to other sites."
-Google
April 9, 2010
