The Billion Dollar HTML Tag

Can a single HTML tag really make a difference on a corporation’s financial results? It can at Google, according to Marissa Mayer, who says web page loading speed translates directly to the bottom line.

“It’s clear that latency really does matter to users,” said Mayer, the VP of Search and User Experience at Google and today’s keynote speaker at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference. Google found that delays of fractions of a second consistently caused users to search less. As a result, its engineers consistently refine page code to capture split-second improvements in load time.

This phenomenon is best illustrated by a single design tweak to the Google search results page in 2000 that Mayer calls “The Billion Dollar HTML Tag.” Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page asked Mayer to assess the impact of adding a column of text ads in the right-hand column of the results page. Could this design, which at the time required an HTML table, be implemented without the slower page load time often associated with tables?

Mayer consulted the W3C HTML specs and found a tag (the “align=right” table attribute) that would allow the right-hand table to load before the search results, adding a revenue stream that has been critical to Google’s financial success.