I love that Google is focusing on how to speed up the web, but they are missing the most obvious thing they could do that would have a dramatic impact on the speed of the web: Update their PageRank algorithm to take into account website speed, and then publish this as a fact. The idea would be that they would have GoogleBot measure the latency, and overall page load time and rank sites higher that respond faster, and…
Except your network connection to a site is going to be drastically different than Google's. Case in point: My datacenter directly peers with Comcast, so I get It would be like comparing the drive to a particular location using completely different starting points. Plus, people would start doing all sorts of tricks to boost their ranking. Serving static, cached files for Google and giving everyone else a slow, dynami…
Google just needs to figure out a reasonable baseline latency to subtract - for that, there's ping, ping the previous host on the route, latency to other hosts with close IPs, GeoIP+a database of baseline latency to sites in the same area etc.
And the tricks will be dealt with the same way as now: If you're caught doing them, you're blacklisted. But this will be less of an issue in this case: If you've taken the trouble to set up caches that you can direct Google to -- why not direct your actual users to that too?