Now we have previews in the search results, so we know for sure that Google renders websites.
Next to detecting hidden spam or javascript layout changes, I presume this rendering can be used to produce a waterfall of the site loading process.
So while Google does this with a HTML5 feature in modern browsers, internally it should already have:
- page speed scores
- render scores (perhaps render time)
of all websites in index, regardless the browser their users use.
That is how I think Google measures site speed; it uses these known non-HTML5 factors for ranking the fastest websites.
As for the W3C timing spec, it looks like Firefox is planning on implementing this too: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=570341
Now we have previews in the search results, so we know for sure that Google renders websites.
Next to detecting hidden spam or javascript layout changes, I presume this rendering can be used to produce a waterfall of the site loading process.
So while Google does this with a HTML5 feature in modern browsers, internally it should already have:
- page speed scores
- render scores (perhaps render time)
of all websites in index, regardless the browser their users use.
That is how I think Google measures site speed; it uses these known non-HTML5 factors for ranking the fastest websites.