Remember the days of dial-up Internet? There was a whole process of logging on and sitting through a series of random noises that resembled cartoon sound effects. After connecting to the Internet, whatever website that you went to seemed to take ages to load.  And let’s not forget about downloading songs! One song took, what, 20 minutes to download? But that was back when the Internet was new and something the world had never seen. Thankfully, we now have broadband Internet, which makes browsing online a breeze. But what if it could go even faster?

Google is taking it upon itself to make it even faster and more user-friendly by launching initiatives that, in its own words, will make “browsing the Web as fast as turning the pages of a magazine.” The launch of Caffeine, its recent algorithm update, will increase the size of its index, spit out more relevant results and speed up the return of those results.

Recently, the search engine announced the launch of another initiative called Google Public DNS, a DNS resolver. What in the world is a DNS resolver, you may ask? To put it in simple terms, it’s a switchboard for the Internet. For example, when a user types in an address (let’s say www.15miles.com), he or she is taken to that website. However, on the back end, it’s more complicated.

The Web address is converted into its unique Internet Protocol (IP) number (e.g., 74.125.45.100) that computers use to communicate with each other. Most users end up performing hundreds of DNS lookups each day, and some complex Web pages require multiple DNS lookups before the site starts loading (this can slow the browsing experience). Google is trying to resolve this problem by launching its own, faster DNS resolver.

Google is also asking site designers to think about browsing speed when creating and maintaining their sites, by thinking twice before adding a feature that hurts performance if the benefit of the feature is unproven. A website is available that provides Web masters tools to make their sites even faster, as well as opportunities to learn and participate in an effort of making the overall Web faster.

What this means is that all of these developments will work together to make the search engine itself faster. Let’s break it down.  Site designers build and maintain websites that will allow it to load faster when a user comes to it, and Google Public DNS will allow faster communication among computers when users visit websites. Google Caffeine will pull sites through it’s algorithm onto a search engine results page faster. Obviously, Google is making speed a significant factor when determining a site’s relevance.  This will be an important consideration when managing SEO efforts.