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It's time for another round of grab bag questions.

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We record all these questions on one day, and then we send them out over the course of many different days.

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So, last time everbody complained that they were seeing the same red polo shirt for like 30 or 40 days in a row.

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So I actually brought a bunch of different shirts, and we'll just sprinkle it up and mix it up a little bit so you get a little more variety in your shirts.

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So let's start with the first question from Deepesh in New York.

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Deepesh asks, "What impact do site load times have on Google rankings?"

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The short answer is, none right now. Now let's give a little more color.

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Of course, if a site takes so long to load that we can't even fetch it, Googlebot can't get a copy of it,

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then that will have an effect on your rankings, because your site is essentially timing out.

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So if your site is taking 20 or 30 seconds to respond to requests, that could be a problem.

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But if your site takes one second versus two seconds, that has no difference whatsoever on Google's rankings.

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So that's the short answer. Now let's give a little more color.

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If you haven't heard, Larry, Larry Page, has talked about how he wants the web to be.

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He wants the web to be really fast. Almost as fast as a magazine.

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Like as soon as you can turn the page, you're ready for the next page.

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And so Chrome was built with that philosophy, you know we want to make the web really fast, make it a really good experience.

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So currently site load times have no effect on Google's rankings, you know what might happen in the future? I don't know.

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I could certainly imagine Google saying, "Well we'd like the web to be faster. What can we do to encourage people to make their sites faster?"

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And how can we try to get the word out that if your site is faster,

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people will be happier and they're more likely to come back to your site or to use your site more often.

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We've seen that on our own site.

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So it is interesting that we want the web to be fast and we want sites to load quickly.

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Right now, it's not at all a factor in our rankings. For the future, who knows what might be involved?

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Personally, I think it's a great idea if you can look at some of the ways to make your site a little faster.

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So for example, don't include 40 different JavaScript files.

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You can compact those all into one JavaScript or one CSS file.

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You know, don't include huge images when you're image size is only set to something tiny.

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There's a lot of ways that you can minify or compact your pages to make them return faster for users.

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You can gzip pages, for example.

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So there's a lot of ways you can look at that's really good for user experience.

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Don't worry about it from a search engine ranking perspective right now,

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but it probably can make a really big difference for your users.