Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Silly Space Optimization on Google's Home Page?

According to @chrisskelton and @wkvong, Google leaves off the ending </html> and </body> tags from their home page to optimize for space:

  1. chrisskelton Today I learned that Google excludes the </body> and </html> tags from their main page to save 18 bytes.
  2. wkvong You know Google is crazy because Google's home page doesn't close its <body> or <html> tags for performance
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Indeed, if you check out the source code for the Google home page it's not there:

To put this in perspective: according to SearchEngineWatch.com Google gets about 91 million hits per day (in 2006). Assuming all those searches start on the home page (and there's no caching involved), that's:

18 bytes * 91,000,000 hits = 1638000000 bytes
                             1599609.38 kilobytes
                             1562.12    megabytes
                             1.53       gigabytes

If we go by monthly hits:

18 bytes * 2,733,000,000 hits = 49194000000 bytes
                                48041015.63 kilobytes
                                46915.05    megabytes
                                45.82       gigabytes

That's 1.5 gigabytes per-day (or 45.82 gigabytes per-month) that Google doesn't have to send, it doesn't pay for, and consumers don't pay for— all by leaving off a few useless tags. Not really that crazy.

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