Speed Index: New metric for page performance | Hacker News Reader

Speed Index: New metric for page performance

sites.google.com

47 pointsjoedevon4 comments

How would this metric work for websites that load real-time dynamic content? For example, if a website loads quickly then slowly streams data from the back end, how would this metric account for that?

I think at some point in time they assume that the page is complete and use that as a reference point to compare the rest of the frames to. It's most likely the window load event.

I think in fully dynamic pages, that constantly change, it's worth presenting the video and let the person running the test pick a "final state" to compare against. You can then work backwards as in the automatic case.

Anything and everything that GOOG weights is critically important to be able to measure.

So somebody please build a MVP that lets me type in my URL and get a best-guess for how GOOG is going to rank me along with a simple visual output like those charts that I can stick into my reporting for clients.

Then go send the link to Search Engine land, Matt Cutts, SEOMoz Blog team, etc - definitely going to be a pressing need for this info from SEO teams, and no immediately obvious place to find it, summary of ranking algorithm:

"The technique we settled on was to take histograms of the colors in the image (one each for red, green and blue) and just look at the overall distribution of colors on the page. We calculate the difference between the starting histograms (for the first video frame) and the ending histogram (last video frame) and use that difference as the baseline. The difference of the histogram for each frame in the video versus the first histogram is compared to the baseline to determine how "complete" that video frame is."

Edit - your list to market to: http://www.ebizmba.com/articles/seo-websites

Just to be clear, this webpage is describing a metric that is part of webpagetest.org an open source project that just happens to be hosted on Google Code and Google Pages. While some Google employees may contribute to the project, it is not an open sourcing of Google Search's exact page speed metrics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com