Google wants to make the Web faster. As well as optimizing its own sites and services to run at blazing speed, the company has been helping to streamline the rest of the Web, too. Now Google has released free software that could make many sites load twice as fast.

"We think making the whole Web faster is critical to Google's success," says Rabbat. Making the Web faster should encourage people to use it more and increase the likelihood that they will use Google's services and software. Rabbat points to the frustration that people feel when they click a link or type a URL and see a blank page for several seconds. "In many cases," he says, "I'll navigate away when that happens."

The software, called mod_pagespeed, can be installed and configured on Apache Web servers, the most commonly used software for running websites. Once installed, mod_pagespeed determines ways to optimize a site's performance on the fly. For example, it will compress images more efficiently and change settings so that more of the pages are stored in a user's browser cache, so that the same data doesn't have to be loaded repeatedly. The software will be automatically updated, notes Richard Rabbat, product manager for the new project. He says that this means that as Google and others make improvements, people who install it will benefit without having to make any changes.

Google already offers a tool called Page Speed that measures the speed at which a website loads and suggests ways to make improvements. "We asked ourselves, instead of just telling people what the problems are, can we just fix it for them automatically?" Rabbat says.