Google replaced "similar pages" with "similar".

http://i39.tinypic.com/20k982u.jpg

Anyone care to estimate how many tens of thousands of dollars bandwidth they save each day, due to that change?

Would they really save any?

Why wouldn't they save any? Every page of 10 search results is now 60 bytes shorter. Multiply that by 300 million searches per day, giving a bandwidth saving of ... 18 Gigabytes or roughly $2.70 per day.

OK, OK, the bandwidth saving is much lower than I thought. I thought Google would be serving much more than 300 million searches per day.

"Google Searches Per Day ... 293 Million ... March 2009"
http://blog.usaseopros.com/2009/04/15/google-searches-per-day-reaches-293-million-in-march-2009/

Their results page HTML is rather optimized but apparently not super optimized. For instance, I'm seeing quite a few links starting with "http: //www.google.com/..." where a "/..." would have sufficed (as I'm already on www.google.com).

In their meta charset definition, is the blank in "text/html; charset=UTF-8" needed? (Why do they send that charset within the HTML anyway, are there browsers out there who don't understand the http header charset?)

Here's the real reason for this change:

http://img81.imageshack.us/img81/5582/reviewsite.png

Philipp, the explicit links and charset might help when a web page is saved to disk and viewed by e.g. Microsoft Word. In that case there's no HTTP header.

Ionut: Excuse me, but what the link between a shorter link and our perverse universe? ;)

"Similar pages" has been replaced with "similar" to make room for "review this site" (it's probably still an experiment, right now Google uses an icon).