Big Fat Google

The Google Search page epitomizes web performance or rather, used to. Web performance guru, Steve Souders, noted in a tweet that the Google Search page now has 11 requests and measures 500KB when a user isn't logged into to his Google Account. Logged in is 19 requests. He questions if this is the new standard for "lightweight"?

Due to Google's increasing focus on personalization of search results, it now takes a relatively longer time for results to be fetched and the page to load though it is still in the order of milli-seconds.

It took 0.23 seconds to fetch results while logged in but it took 0.16 seconds with Google Custom (which is lighter than the regular search page as it lacks a few bells and whistles) for getting results for the same keywords. 

Notice how in the regular search page, the first record which is an ad is almost indistinguishable (there is a tiny orange icon marking it as an Ad) from search result that comes after it. Earlier, ads used to have a light background color and it was clearly apparent that it was an ad. It now appears that Google is pulling all stops to make money from ads & popularizing Google+ through Google Search.

Without realizing that the first result was an ad, I clicked on it - the Sitelinks, made it even more convincing.

(Weirdly, ICICI Bank which has placed that ad hasn't bothered to check that it redirects to an error page as the original link is dead)