Google announces launch of new feature to make surfing faster on slow internet connections

Search engine giant Google today announced the launch of a new feature that would allow users in India to surf the web faster even with slow internet speeds. "With over 200 million Indians accessing the Internet from a smartphone, we're working hard to make access faster and more affordable," Hiroto Tokusei, product manager, Google Inc, said in a telephonic interaction, The Hindu reported.

He added in India, where network connections were often slow, getting information on phone could be tough, and frustrating.

In two weeks Google would start rolling out the feature, which it claimed would load pages four times faster and at the same time consume 80 per cent less data.

According to Tokusei, the feature was triggered automatically when the user was on a slower network connection. He said they would of course be able to choose if they wanted to see the original page.

Google had already tested the feature, which was targeted at emerging markets, in Indonesia. It would soon launch in Brazil as well.

Tokusei said, in October, the company made efforts to make search lighter for India and Brazil, but only making search lighter did not work if a user clicked on a link and it did not load.

He added, the feature was triggered when a network connection was very, very slow, such as 2G, he added.

The India launch comes after tests the search company conducted in Indonesia over the last month for streamlined search results and optimised pages when the user searched on slow mobile connections.

The light pages loaded four times faster and used 80 per cent  less data, while increasing the traffic to webpages by more than 50 per cent.

During its annual developer conference, Google I/O 2015, late last month, the company said it was going to pilot a new feature on the Chrome Android browser to tackle slow internet speeds in India. The quality of the user's internet connection would be evaluated by the feature and the way the result page appeared to the suser would be moderately changed.

According to Tokusei, some stylesheets...having high image quality took more data on a slow network, The Economic Times reported.

These were compressed using the new feature, and sometimes the page looked slightly different.