Why is Google so Fast?

November 11th, 2007 - 9:00AM

It’s no coincidence that the most successful search engine on the planet is also the fastest to return results. Here are some time charts from HttpWatch for Google and its two closest competitors; Yahoo and Live.com: Google.com returns its results page in 0.155 seconds: Live.com returns its results page in 0.619 seconds: Yahoo returns its results page in 1.131 seconds: These screen shots were created by visiting the home page of each search engine with an empty cache and then entering a search term while recording with the free, Basic Edition of HttpWatch After clicking the ‘Search’ button, the results … Continue reading →

Using Ctrl+F5 in IE 7

October 10th, 2007 - 9:55AM

Typing Ctrl+F5 in Internet Explorer is a handy way to force the reload of a page and all its component parts (e.g. images, css , javascript etc). It has the same effect as visiting a page with an empty browser cache. If you use HttpWatch with Ctrl+F5 in IE 6, you can see that every request returns an HTTP 200 OK response: This indicates that the complete content of each HTTP item was returned. However, in IE7 you may see a different response after typing Ctrl+F5: Only the HTML of the page is returned with a 200 OK response; the other … Continue reading →