According to a recent interview with Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, Matt hinted that speed of a site may now be taken into account in the ranking of pages on their search engine. And what a good idea this is.

Some would argue that we have reached a ridiculous stage where we are not prepared to wait even a few extra seconds for a page to download. Often is the very creative and visually full pages, often with moving elements, that take a long time to download and sometimes what you see is a disappointment. But simple sites can also be visually appealing and deliver the same results.

Wonderfully rich and creative but slow sites are often led by creatives. This is fine but in business we have to face consumer facts -people do move away very quickly when a site takes too long to download. There are too many other sites for us to see. Its only if we particularly want to see a site that we are prepared to wait.

Sometimes amateur sites are very slow because the developer knows little about how to streamline a sight for speed.

Now it seems that Google are hinting that they may penalise slow sites. Faster sites will be rewarded with higher rankings. This already happens naturally to some degree as sites that are slow to load get less repeat traffic anyway which makes them fall in the rankings.

Google’s Matt Cutts said:

‘Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.

‘I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about ‘how do I have my site be fast,’ how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?’

Have a slow site is the equivalent of keeping a client waiting at the door for too long. No one is going to die but its just not good business practice. After all the principle of all web etiquette is to think of your customer first and customers are saying ‘we don’t like slow sites’.

Google is set to launch its newest tool, Google Squared, they announced at their Searchology Summit on Wednesday.

Google Squared is designed to offer instant information in a ’square’ spreadsheet form. Google has provided screen shots to show what the application will look like but have said that there may be changes implemented before its publication.

 Matt Cutts, head of Google’s Webspam team, explained in his blog:

‘[I]f you typed in ’small dogs’ then Google would try to return types of small dogs, along with facts like how much they weigh. It’s easy to add a row to the Square, so you could add a row for Lhasa Apso and Google will try to infer the relevant facts from the web. You can also add new columns, e.g. if you type ’energy level’ then Google will look for corroborating facts across the web and try to guess the energy level of each type of dog.’

Google Squared is due to be launched later this month via Google Labs which is a platform designed to showcase Google’s experimental projects.