Ok, for the average viewer a 0.25 second improvement doesn’t look like much.

CLICK IMAGE

However, this is extrememly deceptive. The searches were using the the bare minimum terms necessary.

http://www.feedster.com/search.php?q=[SEARCH TERM]

This stopped working correctly last night. Effectively, it looks like Feedster’s Date Search is broken. How did I figure this out? Well, the size of the results page went from 30,000+ bytes to 15,000+ bytes. This is always a clue that either:

1. The server has started using a compression technology
2. The page being returned is not the one you expect

I have switched the measurements back to Relevance Searches; these are less important to blog searches (more like old-school search engines). This will keep Feedster on an even par with everyone else, it will have to stay this way until Feedster fixes their Date Search.

The new search is:

http://www.feedster.com/search.php?q=[SEARCH TERM]&sort=relevance

I would love to hear from the Feedster team when they have fixed this issue.

UPDATE: Scott Johnson and Jeff Kletsky from Feedster dropped by. The relevance search is back up and running, and the measurement has been updated accordingly.

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• Technorati: Tag Search Update — WOW!
• Performance Improvement From Caching and Compression
• GrabPERF: Compression Performance Study, Early Results