14 DAY TRIAL // For Google every millisecond counts. This is true for all its products but it's especially important for its search engine. While some would argue that today's search engines are already too fast for any improvement to be noticeable, it hasn't stopped any of them from constantly making speed-related changes. One move that would give back the speed crown to Google, as some claim that Bing is now faster, is the introduction of AJAX technology to its search page which, despite having been in testing for several months without any official update on its status, may be close to a wider rollout.
AJAX is actually a group of standard web technologies designed to allow pages to update data or certain segments of the page without having to be fully re-rendered or reloaded. Google has been using AJAX in a small-scale test since last year but has not extended it beyond its initial scope so far. While Google's search results page is one of the fastest in the world and speed has always been one of the biggest concerns, with AJAX the company manages to make it even faster by rendering only the parts that need updating when conducting a new search. As such, only the results themselves and the ads get pulled from the servers and are redrawn for the user.
Initially, many in the SEO business feared that this move would render SEO rank checkers and other similar tools useless. Furthermore, they claimed that this would give Google a significant and unfair advantage in the analytics market as they believed that Google Analytics would be the only such tool to be able to get relevant information from the new search methods. However, those fears were mostly put to rest as supporting the new feature would require little changes from analytics companies, which have also had plenty of time to prepare.
Google though has stayed mostly quiet and hasn't pushed the technology to a wider market just yet but with the launch of Bing, Microsoft's latest search engine, which has been seeing mostly positive reviews and feedback and a slight increase in traffic, some say this may be the perfect time for Google to introduce the technology on a larger scale. The reason is that Bing may be slightly faster than Google at this point and, while the difference may be indistinguishable, faster pages translates into more searches, which in turn translates into more money.
For the moment though Google is staying quiet but users who want to see the new AJAX-powered Google search page in action and aren't among the lucky few who are part of the test can head over to the new Google Caffeine sandbox page where the feature is enabled for all searches.