Google believes its new Asia-based data centers, due later this year, could speed up search results in the Asia-Pacific region. Accoding to India’s The Economic Times, those new data centers are based in Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Google will reportedly pay $300 million on the three facilities. Lalitesh Katragadda, country head of India Products at Google, told the paper that the data centers would prove “crucial” in speeding up Internet connections in India. A recent assessment by Akami ranked India’s average Internet speed as 112th in the world. Katragadda declined to quantify the actual impact of the new data centers on search performance; another source, NxtGen Datacenter & Cloud Services managing director Raj Gopal AS, told The Economic Times that the proximity of the data centers would translate into performance boosts of up to 30 percent. Google also told the Times that it didn’t place a data center in India because of the country’s hot weather.

Need for Speed

For Google, speed is everything. When the company released Google Instant, which offers results before the user even finishes typing in a search term, it noted that the average person types one keystroke every 300 milliseconds, whereas it takes a mere 30 milliseconds to glance at another portion of a Webpage—meaning that, by predicting a search and showing results before a search term is fully inputted, Google Instant can save an average of 2-5 seconds per search. Performance is not only critical to how Google delivers its own search results, but also how the company views Web pages indexed on other servers. Matt Cutts, head of the anti-spam team at Google, recently pointed out that smaller Webpages might not appear in search results due to server load. “It's also hosted on a webserver that is fairly heavily loaded,” he wrote. “As a result, crawling pages from this site has been lower in our crawl priority.” Indeed, server load is just one of 200 factors that Google apparently uses to assign search rankings to Web pages. “The key point there is that Internet users care a lot about load time—faster sites mean happier users, and search is about providing users the best answers as quickly as possible,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email to SlashDataCenter. For some parts of Asia, 2013 could be the year that search results get a whole lot faster.   Image: Regien Paassen/Shutterstock.com