Google Speeds Up the Internet By Compressing More Efficiently

Home » The Web » Google Speeds Up the Internet By Compressing More Efficiently

Google Speeds Up the Internet By Compressing More Efficiently

Posted by Jason Effraimidis Saturday, March 2, 2013 0 comments

Google decided to launch and adopt the Zopfli Compression Algorithm, a new open source data compression library which can compress webpage content 3% to 8% more densely than the standard zlib library used. Funny enough, the name Zopfli comes from a specific kind of Swedish bread and we know how Google likes to name their projects with names of different foods and desserts.

Benefits

By using this new algorithm, Google can improve the speed of the internet, load pages much faster and make the user experience a lot better for its users.

More specifically, with the Zopfli Compression Algorithm Google can achieve:

better space utilization

faster data transmission

lower web pages load latencies

lower data transfer fees for mobiles

reduced battery use

How this works?

According to Lode Vandevenne, Software Engineer of the Compression Team, by using more exhaustive compression techniques they can achieve higher data density but at the cost of slower compression (the decompression speed is unaffected).

Lode Vendevenne also stated that "The exhaustive method is based on iterating entropy modeling and a shortest path search algorithm to find a low bit cost path through the graph of all possible deflate representations."

All things come with a price and so does the Zopfli Compression Algorithm since it requires longer to compress files because of the amount of CPU time required. It requires 2 to 3 orders of magnitude more than what zlib required so Google stated that "Zopfli is best suited for applications where data is compressed once and sent over a network many times, for example, static content for the web".

Charity or Profit?

Anyone excited for the free service that Google will provide us by compressing with Zopfli? I am sure that Google will get something in return for this act, either that means less workload for their servers or gaining users from other search engines like Yahoo and Bing, since the benefits are great. More wireless data plan sounds great to my ears and i'm sure for all of you who tend to browse the internet on the road.