Google’s Instant Pages drastically improves webpage loading speeds

Google demonstrated the speed improvements of its new Instant Pages feature at today’s Inside Search live event, which focused on additions to its Instant Search product.

Instant Pages uses web rendering to load webpages from search results 3 to 5 times faster for the average person, according to Google’s Amit Singhal, who reaffirmed the company’s commitment to a faster search experience during the demo.

Singhal explained that the average webpage takes about 5 seconds to load, making the total search experience roughly 30 seconds long, according to the “Query Timeline” infograph used in the demo. That amount of time will probably seem arbitrary for anyone not in charge of improving the world’s most successful web search engine.

The company first made an effort to speed up the search experience with Instant Search, which begins working immediately as a user starts entering words into the search bar (without having to press enter or the “search” button). Instant Pages seeks to do the same with the webpages people are navigating to.

The Instant Pages feature will be available on Google Chrome Beta later this week and is currently available on the developer version of Google’s Chrome browser. Since the code is open-source, Google hopes other browsers will adopt the pre-rendering functionality as a standard.

Google also announced that Instant search functionality is coming for images as well as the ability to search via voice or image from a desktop.

Check out Google’s official demo video for Instant Pages below.