A recent Financial Times report informs that some of Europe’s top telecoms groups are preparing to fight Google for its ‘bandwidth-hungry’ video sharing service YouTube. Three of Europe’s telecommunication giants Telefónica, France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom are of the opinion that the search giant should pay them for the bandwidth YouTube and Google’s other services consume over their networks. This coalition might also join hands with online content owners such as media groups whose content Google aggregates on its news service for free.

Some European telecom groups even fear that the search giant’s bandwidth-hungry services might potentially reduce their networks into ‘dumb pipes’ because Google pays little or nothing for carrying its services. The new telecommunication coalition is of the point that the present state of affairs, where consumers are charged for access to the internet but websites are exempt from paying for their content that the users consume, should change. According to the report, Europe’s telecom groups are “spending billions of Euros on fixed-line and mobile infrastructure to increase broadband download speeds and network capacity, but some fear they may struggle to secure a return on their investments.”

Google’s data-intensive services like YouTube appear to have become a headache for Europe’s network operators. Telefónica’s chairman César Alierta even demanded that Google start sharing its online ad revenues with the telecom groups so as to compensate the network operators for carrying the search giant’s data-intensive services. He added that Google is freely using Europe’s networks without paying anything to anybody. “Let’s see the development of digital society in terms of the winners and the victims. And today, there is a winner who is Google. There are victims that are content providers, and to a certain extent, network operators. We cannot accept this,” said the new chief executive of France Telecom, Stéphane Richard. Deutsche Telekom’s chief executive René Obermann also expressed the same views.

Google’s response over this was an obvious denial. Rick Whitt, a senior policy director at Google in Washington said that the company “was spending large amounts on its own data networks to carry its traffic to the point where it is handed over to telecoms companies round the world.”

Now your site’s better rankings are also speed-dependent as Google adds site speeds into the list of its search ranking crtieria. The rumours about Google’s possible inclusion of the speed factor in its search ranking criteria started to make headlines back in November 2009 when Google launched its Site Performance tool as a part of Webmaster Tool Labs. According to Google itslef, the tool “shows you the average page load time for pages in your site, the trend over the last few months, and some suggestions on how to make the pages load faster.”

Google has lately been obsessed with speed and efficiency for the overall good of the web. The major purpose behind its site performance tool and now the site speed signal is that Google wants to ensure that users get the most relevant results twinned with a great user experience for which speed plays a central role. “Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web (especially for those users with slow internet connections),” Google explains.

The web giant revealed its decision of using site speed in search rankings in the company’s official blog on April 9. “You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests,” is how Google’s blog post opens. Google goes on to explain in the post how faster sites create happier users and how people tend to spend less time on slow sites.

But thankfully, page relevance is still more important for Google and only less than 1% of the search queries are being affected by the newly implemented site speed signal at present. Moreover, the site speed signal is currently applying only “for visitors searching in English on Google.com.” Those who haven’t seen any change to their rankings means that the speed signal didn’t impact their website, as Google puts it.

In addition to its own site performance tool, Google also recommends some other tools for measuring site speeds and performance. These tools include Page Speed, YSlow, and WebPagetest.

People have mixed feelings for this new change from Google. In response to the blog post, a user @amanda posted a comment saying, “Exciting stuff. Glad speed is becoming a target for search ranking…” Another user @dianosq didn’t think it was a good idea and asked “What about sites that post lots of photos on their pages or use complex services that take longer to load? What about all the sites that use advertisement?...” While a user @navi arora was left bemused complaining, “Now i have to move my websites from Shared Hosting to VPS :( ”

A fully loaded website for Halcon Real Estate with a new fresh look and feel has finally arrived. A pleasant mix of new look, new feel and the latest technology running behind the curtain makes the new Halcon website another great addition to our web design Dubai portfolio. The cleint is just as happy as our design and development team and describes our service as a ‘surprising harmony of beautiful design and flawless functionality.’ With this latest addition to our web design work and many other previous projects for Dubai’s top real estate clients, Traffic has become the region’s leader in property website production.

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