I find that I use Technorati less these days than Google Blogsearch and Bloglines/Ask for looking at blog stuff. This is not to do with poorer results. It is to do with speed: Technorati makes you wait for a moment. And I don't like waiting.

I was interested to see the report of Marissa Mayer's discussion of the importance of speed. This is not just a user experience issue: for Google, speed of response turns into dollars.

For Google, or any other Web site, speed means people viewing more pages in same visit and spending more time overall online…and more money. [» Google’s Marissa Mayer: Speed wins | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com]

Update: the BBC has a story that online shoppers will give up on a site if it takes a page more than four seconds to load. They are reporting research commissioned by Akamai, which also suggests that tolerance for delay is dropping, and that their experience of the online presence colors users overall view of an organization.

Speed of response is an area where expectations have changed in the last couple of years: it would be interesting to know how important this factor is in perceptions of library resources (think metasearch for example). And to what extent the design and performance of web sites colors people's overall view of the library.