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Shorter labels in Google Search

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

Thursday, June 11, 2009
15 years ago3,698 views

Google replaced "similar pages" with "similar".

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

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

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

James Xuan [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Would they really save any?

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

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/

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

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?)

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

Here's the real reason for this change:

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

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

[put at-character here]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.

Jérôme Flipo [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

[put at-character here]Ionut: Excuse me, but what the link between a shorter link and our perverse universe? ;)

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

15 years ago #

"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).

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