Google results are influenced by speed

After numerous rumors that I have read and argued about the fact that Google results are influenced by the page loading speed, the company is taking another step and write a press release confirming this.

They stated that based on numerous internal statistics they have reached to this decision - Internet users spend more time on a site with a good upload speed and give up quickly to those that move very slowly. Therefore all Google projects work very well at speed and it's time for our projects to do the same.

A wise decision, a decision that was expected. To monitor the loading speed of a page (after Google's analysis), we have one application in Webmaster Tools which does exactly what we need.

Also, Google recommends other applications that pursue the same goal. It should be noted however that this change hasn't bothered too much the ranking results by more than 1% of all pages owned by Google, which is not very worrying.