According to @chrisskelton and @wkvong, Google leaves off the ending </html>
and </body>
tags from their home page to optimize for space:
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chrisskelton Today I learned that Google excludes the </body> and </html> tags from their main page to save 18 bytes. wkvong You know Google is crazy because Google's home page doesn't close its <body> or <html> tags for performance
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.