Rumor has it that Google is looking to add your site’s speed as a factor in its search algorithm (yet another reason to not use free web hosting).  Recently at PubCon, a presenter from Google noted that there is hard lobbying from many employees at Google to add page load time to the search algorithm, and that it will most likely become a reality in 2010.

Google’s co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin want searching to be as fast as flipping through a magazine.  It will be interesting to see what, if any, ramifications this has.  It’s worth noting that there are currently over 200 different factors in the Google algorithm, so if your page takes a few seconds to load it won’t necessarily make your page rank plummet.

Will hosting companies start marketing actual speeds to customers?  Will companies be forced to spend more money to ensure their sites are “lightning fast?”  Personally, I like this.  If you think about how you behave when browsing the Internet, slow sites often don’t make the cut.  If I’m looking for information related to a specific topic, and a site is taking too long to load, I typically back out and try another site listed in my search results.  If Google can make this process quicker for me, by weeding out the slow sites, I see a definite benefit!