Marissa Mayer, vice president for search products and experience at Google, was the keynote speaker at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference yesterday, and her focus, as is usual with Google, was on speed. Google, as a company, is known for its obsession with speed from its home page to the Chorme browser. It's even set up an online resource with tips and tricks for web designers to optimize their pages. But Google speed isn't just about the user experience, it's about money. A lot of money.

Google's VP shared a story with the audience at the conference about how a simple design tweak she called the “billion dollar HTML tag” influenced the fate of Google. Back in 2000, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page asked Mayer to find out how a column of text ads on the right-hand side of Google's search results page would affect the web page's load times.

At the time, the change had to be implemented with an HTML table, which was notoriously slow. She found a simple table attribute “align=right,” which would allow the text ads to load before the search results and without impairing the page's speed. The new revenue stream would turn the company into the Internet giant it is today.

Mayer went on to showcase some of the results of Google's research team, which experimented by adding artificial delays to see their effect on users. They found that even a 400-ms delay would make the users conduct fewer searches by 0.2 percent to 0.6 percent. While this might seem of little consequence for a company the size of Google, it could turn into hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue over the course of a year.