According to Firebug, this page currently takes 2.23 seconds to fully load. The central page, however, completely loads in about 1.43 seconds, and is available about then. i have no idea if this will help or kill my future Google rank, but i already know how i can game it.
See, that's the thing about "page speed". While i, like most digital crack addicted individuals who've spent far too much of our youth on < 56K modems to remember what that sort of pain with these sorts of things, i also remember things like what Microsoft originally pioneered with their site, where they divided content chunks of their page as javascript elements that did "document.write()". It did indeed dramatically increase page "speed", but didn't really solve the problem that making one dozens of requests vs one large request over a 56K link wasn't necessarily "faster".
What i try to do is construct my page so that the stuff you probably want to read (e.g. this post) is the first thing to pop onto the page. The other crap loads long afterwards. Heck, there's some chunks of the page that take quite a few seconds to load. When i was living in HTML 1.0 land, i did the same trick by dividing the page into sections and having the table based layout load in segments. Stuff blinked onto the page long before the page was officially "ready".
Of course, now with AJAX and DHTML, page load can be insanely fast, even if it can take over a minute for the page to fully complete. In the case of sites like GMail, it could be argued that the page never completely "loads" since elements are constantly being swapped in and out.
It kind of saddens me that Google thinks that this metric is important enough to gauge and potentially factor into search results. It's a bit like judging great literature by walking through the library with a kitchen scale, or taking a tape measure through a museum. i'd much rather have a large page that contains all the content i want rather than have to fish back and forth on pages like some article on an ad heavy magazine site. i kinda hoped we were beyond the "tiny text" with huge amounts of supplemental flash, but introducing metrics like this just mean that folks who have that sort of design are rewarded over folks that currently "do the right thing".
For what it's worth, i really have no intention of changing how my pages load. They work well enough for me and suite both my design aesthetic and the goals i have. For that matter, when they're over taken by some ad heavy site that favors single terms on DHTML loaded sites or likewise sites of questionable value, i have little doubt that the value of the providing search engine will also be questioned.
Now, if you don't mind, i'm going to go back to reading my Cliff Notes for War and Peace while admiring a postcard of the Taj Mahal, because that's what's important.
