Google’s Instant web pages – how it works

The holy grail for all web browser developers is speed. Despite the obvious fact that a large part of the speed experienced by the end users is the result of their internet connection, companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple and Opera spend a disproportionate amount of their development time devising ways to speed up the web.

To date, the bulk of efforts by browser makers have been on reducing overheads and speeding up rendering speeds. JavaScript rendering improvements measured in fractions of a second have been touted as the largest of breakthroughs, and most recently developers have harnessed the power of the underlying high-power graphics processing units in PCs to render high-end video. In the world of browsers every millisecond counts.

Now Google has revealed Instant Pages, a new strategy in the ongoing battle for browser supremacy.

Instant Pages is a new feature that promises to do exactly that: return search results instantaneously. Using this technology, Google says that the time taken for a page to be returned from a search result can be reduced to just a fraction of a second. In most cases this is a process that would usually take around 3 to 5 seconds to complete.

The technology behind Instant Pages is relatively straight forward. Using its algorithms, Google calculates which search results are most likely to be clicked on. It then pre-loads the pages in the browser’s cache so that as soon as a click is made the page is available. A promotional video released by Google shows just how fast the cached pages are rendered.

For now the pre-rendering technology is only available in the development versions of Google’s Chrome browser but will also be included in beta versions in the near future.

Describing the new technology on its blog Google said that not all pages in search results would be pre-cached. “We’ll only trigger Instant Pages when we have very high confidence that your site is the exact result users are looking for. Search traffic will be measured in Webmaster Tools just like before this feature, with [results only counting sites the user visited].”

The release of Instant Pages is Google’s latest move in its overall plan to make the web faster.

Almost two years ago Google laid out its vision of various strategies and technologies that could be used to speed up web performance. At the time, Google emphasised the need for web developers to be mindful of load times. Instant Pages takes this to a new level.