Speed matters much more than many people still think. I always felt the raw speed of Google was one of the reasons for its success. “Google increased the number of search results to thirty. Traffic and revenue from Google searchers in the experimental group dropped by 20%. […] we had a similar experience at Amazon.com. In A/B tests, we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue.” I remember a quote by Mark Fletcher about Bloglines: every time they increased the speed, pageviews went way up (people would look at more pages if they’re faster).