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It feels fast because most other sites are insanely slow. Just build a normal HTML+CSS+JS site with serverside rendering, route the assets through a CDN and voila! your site will be just as "fast" as Google.
Edit: I was too quick to judge your post. The article is indeed just about serving content, not about why their results are fast.
I mean... is it? It feels a _lot_ slower than it used to, especially on slower devices. Possibly that 700kB of random crap is implicated :)
Classic HN. Snarky, condescending and nothing of substance. Reminds me why I visit HN less and less lately.
On the author's benchmark, a roundtrip seems to take on average 30ms, and the time to first byte for the main content is around 140ms. Which means that in less than 110ms Google is able to parse the search query, and build the HTTP response.
I'm sure they are heavily relying on caches and other optimizations, and for tail-end requests the result might not be as impressive. But compared to many other websites in 2020 this is still unfortunately not the norm.
Climb to the top of a mountain in the USA (or live in the countryside of a developing country), where you can only get 1 bar of 3g service. Then try to load https://cr.yp.to Ok now try to do a google search for dog food. Tell me which one executes in less than a second, and which one hangs forever
Are you comparing search with a static page load ? Just compare the google page load if you want to compare with that ?
Google search is a huge dog
Conversely, why is Windows search so miserably slow?
Am I the only person here who wasn’t thinking about the frontend, but rather all the things that need to happen in the backend to render the search results? To me it feels like an oversight when answering the question “how the hell is Google so fast?” and not digging into how Google is able to return the results to your actual search query in a matter of milliseconds. That, to me, is the real miracle.
Not discounting the other magic, but exposing read-only data, close to the end user, where freshness isn't a huge concern does simplify things.
Am I the only person here who wasn’t thinking about the frontend, but rather all the things that need to happen in the backend to render the search results? To me it feels like an oversight when answering the question “how the hell is Google so fast?” and not digging into how Google is able to return the results to your actual search query in a matter of milliseconds. That, to me, is the real miracle.
It's from 2010, but the fundamentals probably haven't changed.
Am I the only person here who wasn’t thinking about the frontend, but rather all the things that need to happen in the backend to render the search results? To me it feels like an oversight when answering the question “how the hell is Google so fast?” and not digging into how Google is able to return the results to your actual search query in a matter of milliseconds. That, to me, is the real miracle.
Them being able to take your query, discover the data that answers your query, then optimize that data down to a little html snippet that fast is significantly more impressive to me.
I mean... is it? It feels a _lot_ slower than it used to, especially on slower devices. Possibly that 700kB of random crap is implicated :)
Classic HN. Snarky, condescending and nothing of substance. Reminds me why I visit HN less and less lately.