EMPIRICAL STUDY OF LOAD TIME FACTOR IN SEARCH ENGINE RANKING
Keywords:
E-commerce, Search Engines, Load time, Performance, SERPAbstract
Search engine ranking position is essential for marketing plans of many e-businesses. There is a lot of confusion over factors influencing this position. One of them is time performance factor. The purpose of this paper is to identify the role of load time factor in the algorithm ranking the search results in Google. We present empirical study of 40 phrases and load times measured for the first 30 results for each phrase (1200 websites). Two types of load time factors used by Google were analyzed. To quantitatively confirm the results, simulation of the algorithm is proposed. The simulations show that the load time factor plays role in the Google algorithm, although its weight is not high. From two studied metrics Google seems to use the crawl time, i.e. time spent downloading a page by Google robot. A second set of experiments confirms that load time is not only correlated with the ranking position, but also effectively determines this position.
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