Google Search now uses Speculation Rules API to make search faster
Google Search may now be faster when you use Chrome for Google Search. Google is leveraging Speculation Rules API to prefetch results, ultimately making the overall Google Search experience faster.
“Google Search has been making use of the Speculation Rules API to improve navigation speed from the search results page to the result links and they’ve been using a few features of the API that may be of interest to other site owners,” Google wrote on the Chrome Developers blog.
More details. Google will prefetch the first two search results to speed up the search experience. Google said it does this through using the requires configuration, to ensure prefetches use the private prefetch proxy in Chrome and by using the referrer_policy setting to ensure no details encoded in the search page’s URL are sent to the site in the referer HTTP header.
The results. Google wrote they “saw significant improvements in Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)” for the first two results.
- On Chrome for Android, LCP for clicks from Google Search were reduced by 67 milliseconds.
- Desktop Chrome resulted in a similar improvement in LCP of 58.6 milliseconds.
Beyond the first two results, here are the gains Google posted:
- Desktop Chrome reduced First Contentful Paint (FCP) for navigations from Google Search by 7.6 milliseconds and LCP by 9.5 milliseconds (as shown by A/B testing).
- These represent smaller gains compared to the 58.6 milliseconds improvements seen in the first two results, but that’s not surprising given the smaller lead time as they are not prefetched as eagerly.
Why we care. A faster Google experience may lead to more users, more traffic and hopefully happier and higher converting customers. But again, that is if your site has visibility in Google Search.
That being said, you can read more about the technical details in this Google blog post.