by Rich Karpinski via connectedplanetonline.com
There’s a couple of ways of looking at Google’s announcement this week that it is offering a new service to help Web sites speed delivery of their content. One way is to look at it from the search angle: Google’s search algorithms are obsessed with speed and Google is helping to speed the Web and improve search. Another angle though is to basically consider Google’s new Page Speed Service a content delivery network, or CDN – albeit one with more of a mass market focus.
For a service launched without a ton of fanfare, Page Speed Service is somewhat staggering in is ambition, particularly if large numbers of users take up Google on its offer, as described here:
Page Speed Service is an online service to automatically speed up loading of your web pages. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe.
Google claims its can make pages 25% to 60% faster by caching them closer to users and optimizing Javascript, CSS and HTML. Users can submit their sites via a simple form and institute the change by updating their DNS CNAME settings.
That makes the target of the service, at least at launch, more of a mainstream user – say a blogger or small business – than a big Web enterprise. That’s a much different take on the CDN market, in which CDN servers and services typically run thousands if not millions of dollars and target very large, usually video-based, content sites and enterprise users. At least initially, Google’s service is free, though the company said it eventually intends to charge for the service.
It will be interesting to see if Page Speed Service takes off. Many smaller sites may take the dive, perhaps hoping the extra speed and Google affiliation will deliver good-as-gold SEO improvements. Larger sites may or may not be interested – for much the same reasons. One must wonder, however, about outsourcing Web performance to the cloud via a self-service form. If something goes wrong, will Google be accessible and responsive? Or like other Google services, will users be stuck looking for help via forums and email inquiries (as their sites flounder or become unavailable)?
Could telcos and other CDN/managed service providers tackle a similar opportunity? Probably they could. But Google is used to operating its services – free ones like Gmail and Apps but also its cash cow AdSense – at a much larger scale and across larger numbers of users. That gives it an advantage in taking the CDN mainstream. Dare we call it a potential “cache cow’?