​Google field testing new tech to make mobile pages load 4x faster in Indonesia

An infographic on Google’s plan to speed up mobile web browsing. Source: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog

Indonesia’s internet infrastructure lag behind the rest of the world, with our country’s online speeds coming in 41st out of a survey of 54 countries in 2014. But Indonesia’s large population, combined with its enthusiasm for embracing new technology, has made us a favored testing ground for companies that want to improve internet access in the developing world, such as Facebook with its Internet.org initiative

Now Google is using its technological might to figure out how to get websites to load faster on smartphones with slower connections, and it is doing the field testing for this initiative right here in Indonesia. And if you’re an Android user, you may get to see the improvements very soon. According to the official Google Webmaster Central Blog

“In two weeks, we’re starting a field test in Indonesia to provide streamlined search results and optimized pages when the user searches on slow mobile connections, such as 2G. Our experiments show that optimized pages load four times faster than the original page and use 80% fewer bytes. As our users’ overall experience became faster, we saw a 50% increase in traffic to these optimized pages.”
How exactly does Google optimize pages to make them load faster? Apparently they have developed a way to streamline pages by removing some of the content, “while preserving most of the relevant content.” However, the system gives users the option of visiting the original page as well.  
 
As an example, here’s what our website looks like when run through Google’s optimization transcoder. It’s may not be pretty, but it loads fast. 
 
We’re definitely interested to see how Google continues to develop this technology, because it could be a game changer that helps more Indonesians use parts of the mobile internet that aren’t Facebook.



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