Our visually and behaviorally rich sites are about to lose precious Google juice, WebSiteOptimization.com reports in a new piece titled Page Speed Factored into Google Search Rankings:

Google’s addition of a page speed signal to its search rankings algorithm officially links performance with search engine marketing. The loading speed of a web page affects user psychology in a number of ways, and now it can effect its rankings as well.

This back-to-basics message catches us at a funny time in web design history.

“Make more of less” has long been the norm
Most of us who’ve designed sites for quite a while, and who consider ourselves user- and standards-focused, have traditionally designed sites that loaded faster the competition. We did it by using caching technologies (CSS instead of table layouts, linked instead of inline JavaScript, and so on). For many, many years, we also did it by keeping images to a minimum, using system fonts instead of pictures of type, CSS colors instead of faux backgrounds, and so on.

As the web audience grew, heavily trafficked sites became even more restrictive in their decorative flourishes, whether they cared about web standards or not. Thus Google, while happily using bad CSS and markup, exerted monk-like discipline over its designers. Not only were images out, even such details as rounded corners were out, because the tiny images needed to facilitate rounded corners prior to CSS3 added a tenth of a kilobyte to page weight, and a tenth of a kilobyte multiplied by a billion users was too much.

Of late, we have grown fat
Yet in the past few years, as wideband became the norm, every mainstream site and its brother started acting as if bandwidth didn’t matter. Why use 1K of web form when you could use 100K of inline pseudo-Ajax? Why load a new page when you could load a lightbox instead?

Instead of medium-quality JPEGs with their unimportant details painstakingly blurred to shave KB, we started sticking high-quality PNG images on our sites.

As these bandwidth-luxuriant (and not always beautiful, needed, or useful) practices became commonplace on mainstream sites, many advanced, standards-focused web designers were experimenting with web fonts, CSS3 multiple backgrounds, full-page background images, and other devices to create semantic, structurally lean sites that were as rich (and heavy) as Flash sites.

So now we face a dilemma. As we continue to seduce viewers via large, multiple background images, image replacement, web fonts or sIFR, and so on, we may find our beautiful sites losing page rank.

Read the report and watch this space.

Triple Issue No. 292 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, is all about search.

Testing Search for Relevancy and Precision

by JOHN FERRARA

Despite the fact that site search often receives the most traffic, it’s also the place where the user experience designer bears the least influence. Few tools exist to appraise the quality of the search experience, much less strategize ways to improve it. But relevancy testing and precision testing offer hope. These are two tools you can use to analyze and improve the search user experience.

Internal Site Search Analysis: Simple, Effective, Life Altering!

by AVINASH KAUSHIK

Your search and clickstream data is missing a key ingredient: customer intent. You have all the clicks, the pages people viewed, and where they bailed, but not why they came to the site. Your internal site-search data contains that missing ingredient: intent. Learn five ways to analyze your internal site-search data—data that’s easy to get, to understand, and to act on.

Beyond Goals: Site Search Analytics from the Bottom Up

by LOU ROSENFELD

Top-down analytics are great for creating measurable goals you can use to benchmark and evaluate the performance of your content and designs. But bottom-up analysis teaches you something new and unexpected about your customers—something goal-driven analysis can’t show you. Discover the kinds of information users want, and identify your site’s most urgent mistakes.

Illustration by Kevin Cornell.

Tineye -- reverse search engine; you upload an image and they find you similar images so you know where else it's used. Check out their cool searches.
PDF Pirate -- upload a PDF and this web site will give it back to you minus the restrictions on copying/printing/etc.
Flare -- an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. BSD-licensed, modelled on Prefuse. When there's a visualisation library for every platform, will we start to get people who know how to make them?
The Importance of Failure (Marco Tabini) -- This is a point that I don't often hear made when people talk about failure; the moral behind a failure-related story is usually about preventing it, or dealing with the aftermath, but not about the fact that sometimes things go bad despite your best efforts, and all the careful risk management and contingency planning won't keep you from going down in flames. This is important, because it forces every person to establish a risk threshold that they are willing to accept in every one of their life efforts.