Wow! I had forgot about the "interest" bar under the ads! Nice flashback

The difference in the number of results is interesting to note:

2001: ~4,700,000 results
Now: ~40,500,000 results

That's about 8.6 times more!

But now the search takes 0.12 seconds or thereabouts, compared to 0.06 seconds in the screenshot.

Of course there are lots of random and non-random things which affect the query time, but maybe the integration of news results, videos, related searches etc adds to the processing time.

Actually, Roger, when I tried this a few times, I got widely varying times, from 0.07 to 0.22, so I didn't think it was conclusive enough to post.