Google Focuses on Speed with New Homepage, Public DNS

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 04 Dec 2009

Mountain View-based search engine giant Google has officially announced the fact that it changed its homepage, Google.com. When you go to Google.com you will notice the site has a much cleaner look – until you move the mouse. When you move the mouse, the classic look “fades in”. This is something that I noticed back in November when I installed Windows 7 on my new PC – but at the time I didn’t give it much thought. Google has now announced that it globally rolled out the new homepage and that its main focus is speed (search speed that is).

“For the vast majority of people who come to the Google homepage, they are coming in order to search, and this clean, minimalist approach gives them just what they are looking for first and foremost. For those users who are interested in using a different application like Gmail, Google Image Search or our advertising programs, the additional links on the homepage only reveal themselves when the user moves the mouse. Since most users who are interested in clicking over to a different application generally do move the mouse when they arrive, the "fade in" is an elegant solution that provides options to those who want them, but removes distractions for the user intent on searching,” explained Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products and User Experience.

Here’s why I saw the new fade-in Google homepage back in November. The company has been running experiments with the homepage design for the past few months. During all this time the Google team ran about 10 variants of the fade-in homepage. I must have seen one of these variants.

Moving on, the Mountain View-based search engine giant announced it is focusing on speed (browsing speed this time) by launching its own public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS. Each day, an average internet user performs hundreds of DNS lookups. Because some complex sites need multiple DNS lookups before they start loading, this translates into a slower browsing experience.

"As part of our ongoing effort to make the web faster, we're launching our own public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS, and we invite you to try it out. Our research has shown that speed matters to Internet users, so over the past several months our engineers have been working to make improvements to our public DNS resolver to make users' web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable. As people begin to use Google Public DNS, we plan to share what we learn with the broader web community and other DNS providers, to improve the browsing experience for Internet users globally,” announced Product Manager with Google, Prem Ramaswami.


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