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If google stopped ranking the most relevant content at the top, I would start using bing instead.

You better start using it, then. Be it an official part of pagerank, or some emergent property of their crawlers, I've seen very good evidence that page load speeds have strong influence on natural search rank.

Regardless, Google is doing this to push at the technical limitations on apps like GMail or Google Reader, not Joe Shmo's burger shop.

That was my thinking too. With PageRank Google is trying to find a way to measure the perceived quality of the user experience for each page. Except there's no way to do that directly, so they look at indirect methods, like counting the number of inbound links. This is just another indirect measurement to add to (what I'm sure is) hundreds of other factors they use to rank a site.

IMHO a site that cares about the user experience would have been optimized to load quickly.

Heck, even if Google told people speed was important, and didn't incorporate any speed measurements into PageRank, I think it would have a positive effect.

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