Google search using speed to rank sites

Google web search rankings are now partly affected by a site’s speed, the company has announced on the same day as it reveals its first UK acquisition.

Google search results are now being based partly on a website’s speed, the company has announced. Previously, ranking was purely based on the relevance of a site to the terms a user searched for, but the system has been adjusted after Google studies found that site visitors discriminated against slow web pages.

The search giant said, however, that only a very small number of sites would be affected. Writing on the company’s Webmaster Central Blog, engineers Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts wrote that “While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1 per cent of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation. If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.” The blog post also emphasised the importance of speed for web users and provided links to tools that site owners could use to speed up their web pages.

The news came on the same day that Google announced it had bought Plink, a two person start-up based in Cambridge. The company works on visual search, and its first application, PlinkArt, identified a painting if a user took a photograph of it using their camera phone.

Founders Mark Cummins and James Philbin will now go to work on Google’s Goggles visual search application. Google added that the acquisition, for an undisclosed sum, marked the start of an ambition to buy one firm a month.

Twitter tries to calm developer fears over Tweetie acquisition

Company bought Tweetie to ‘avoid confusion’ among new Twitter users, says engineer

Ryan Sarver, an engineer at Twitter, said the company had acquired third-party client Tweetie in order to make it easier for newcomers to the microblogging service to download a Twitter app. Although there are dozens of third-party clients available, none are allowed to feature “Twitter” in there name, leading to potential confusion.

“We realised that it was causing massive confusion among user’s who had an iPhone and were looking to use Twitter for the first time,” wrote Sarver in a blog post to the development community. “They would head to the App Store, search for Twitter and would see results that included a lot of apps that had nothing to do with Twitter and a few that did, but a new user wouldn’t find what they were looking for and give up. That is a lost user for all of us. This means that we were missing out an opportunity to grow the userbase which is beneficial for the health of the entire ecosystem.”

Sarver also sought to allay the fears of developers who were concerned that Twitter might be about to launch its own suite of products and services traditionally catered for by third-party clients. He said that Twitter would never use the word “official” to describe a mobile or desktop app, but that the company would be adding new functionality to its site, and making acquisitions where appropriate to improve the ecosystem and user experience.

“Each one of those things has the potential to upset a company or developer that may have been building in that space and they then have to look for new ways to create value for users,” he acknowledged. “My promise is that we will be consistent in always focusing on what’s best for the user and the ecosystem as a whole and we will be sincere and honest in our communication with you.”

But industry commentators believe the acquisition of Tweetie could signal the death knell for third-party clients. “When all is said and done, the Twitter client market is dead, a winner has been chosen,” said Zee Kane, editor-in-chief of The Next Web. “The same thing happened for Twitter search and it will happen again for any other Twitter app niche.

“Who visits the App Store, sees ‘Twitter for iPhone’ and thinks it isn’t the official Twitter app? What chance to apps like Tweetdeck and Twittelator have when ‘Twitter for iPhone’ from Twitter ranks first on all Twitter keyword searches in the App Store?”

Twitter is holding Chirp, its first official developer conference, in San Francisco later this week. It appears its acquisition of Tweetie relates only to the iPhone app; Atebits, the company behind the third-party client, said it would be developing Tweetie for the Mac platform, and was putting together a beta as fast as it could.