When you start a business, no matter what kind of niche you have, you need to be the first to market your products in that niche. If you’re the first, you have more chance to increase your montly income before the niche becomes saturated with late adopters and other stragglers.

While in the previous article I’ve talked about the Internet Time Machine, the same team that has created Internet Time Machine, has developed a new search engine called Nowrelevant.com as well.

Image credit: play4smee

We should be seeing some press soon about this cool new engine (NowRelevant) that will give all the results for a subject, but only for the last 14 days. It feels like a Twitter type search only with more content and quicker results, like Google for the Twitter crowd. We like the possibility of a new engine because, believe it or not, Google is now becoming your father’s search engine. Just as Yahoo got big and very arrogant, Google is showing the same tendencies as Frank Kern and Ryan Diess have pointed out. Let’s keep an eye on this (NowRelevant) as their PPC program we hear will use Hyperseek, which has good fraud detection and tracking.

If you’re read my previous article, Internet Time Machine is a series of high powered cloud computer networks that linked together to study internet keyword trends.

They collects data from over 40 million sources worldwide every 24 hours. In doing so, it can find new niches and trends before anyone else. Well, NowRelevant.com is the link to The Internet Time Machine’s search engine that give you every written word about a subject for the past 14 days.

As you see from its name, it culls the web for the topics that are increasing in popularity and becoming relevant today.

This is similar, in some ways, to the trending topics you find on Twitter, except it is pulling information from many more sources. Their criteria are setted in order to evaluate the desirability of any information and are available to servers on a daily basis, minute by minute.

Also, search engines are able to run ppc engines on top of their search interface. The advertising media being based by users of PPC advertising services, and keywords imput by users at the time of the search.

How Do To Use Nowrelevant.com

Look ahead to the future with NowRelevant.com is very easy. Once on the homepage all you need to do is to type the term you want to analyze and click on the search button.

For instance, yesterday my friend told me that he want to start a business about acne. Ok, now we trying to see what happens when we search the term acne into the search engine. Look the image above. In this case I got those result and seen ahead in the next 5 days.

Once you get the results you can adjust how far back in time you would like your Search Results to include.

Here, I’ve put some essential key Curts mentions:

• You do not get irrilevant data such as fake ranking sites, or SEO pages. The search engines was filtered in order to give relevant interent results.
• Any information is returned 1-14 days
• You decide how current you want the information to be that is returned. NowRelevant.com includes a slider to filter the results for the period you wish, i.e. the last 3 days.
• You may promote your products with normal text add (like in Google) but also have on the same PPC area the option to place 125×125 banner ads or even inlcude embedded Video ads.

Now take a look at this video created bu Curt

Find More Info from Blogs and Videos

In order to help you to find the right niche, The Internet Time Machine blogs also offer you some useful videos and blog post. They are all additional information that may be useful to you to make the right choice.

These brief articles give you only a sneak peek, but they can also be indicative of increasingly popular trends and topics on the web. For instance, there is a brief post saying that quinoa is here and it’s the latest health craze, possibly outperforming acai berry in the near future as a (lucrative) super food.

Back To The Future

If you want to make money today, you should to look ahead to the future. The Internet Time Machine is here to help you do that, giving you last trends before anyone else. That could translate into money in the bank.

Today is become very important to establish how slow your website is, since the Google ranking depends by the speed of your pages. There are a lot of ways to test your page load times. Two of my favorite tools are GTMetrix and Google Webmaster Tools. Both give you good result.

To know more about how a slow loading web pages are important on your online readers, Jakob Nielsen has shared his latest article on this very topic.

Website Speed And Page Load Times

Image Credit: Manav Gupta

Slow page rendering today is typically caused by server delays or overly fancy page widgets, not by big images.

Users still hate slow sites and don’t hesitate telling us.

Users really care about speed in interaction design.

13 years ago, I wrote a column called “The Need for Speed,” pointing out how much users hated slow-loading web pages. Back then, big images were the main cause of response-time delays, and our guideline recommended that you keep images small.

Today, most people have broadband, so you might think that download times are no longer a usability concern.

And yes, actual image download is rarely an issue for today’s wireline users (though images can still cause delays on mobile devices).

Still, response times are as relevant as ever. That’s because responsiveness is a basic user interface design rule that’s dictated by human needs, not by individual technologies.

In a client usability study we just completed, for example, users complained that “it’s being a little slow.”

Why Website Speed and Page Load Times Do Matter

Image Credit: Manuel Atienzar

• Human limitations, especially in the areas of memory and attention (as further discussed in our seminar on the human mind and usability). We simply don’t perform as well if we have to wait and suffer the inevitable decay of information stored in short-term memory.
• Human aspirations. We like to feel in control of our destiny rather than subjugated to a computer’s whims. Also, when companies make us wait instead of providing responsive service, they seem either arrogant or incompetent.

A snappy user experience beats a glamorous one, for the simple reason that people engage more with a site when they can move freely and focus on the content instead of on their endless wait.

In a recent study for our seminar on brand as experience, we asked users what they thought about various websites they had used in the past.

So, their responses were based not on immediate use (as in normal usability studies), but on whatever past experiences were strong enough to form memories. Under these conditions, it was striking to hear users complain about the slowness of certain sites.

Slowness (or speed) makes such an impact that it can become one of the brand values customers associate with a site.

(Obviously, “sluggish” is not a brand value that any marketing VP would actively aim for, but the actual experience of using a site is more important than slogans or advertising in forming customer impressions of a brand.)

Indeed, we get findings related to website speed almost every time we run a study.

When sites shave as little as 0.1 seconds off response time, the outcome is a juicy lift in conversion rates.

Today or the 1990s? Same effect.

How Online Readers React To Page Load Times

The three response-time limits are the same today as when I wrote about them in 1993 (based on 40-year-old research by human factors pioneers):

• 0.1 seconds gives the feeling of instantaneous response – that is, the outcome feels like it was caused by the user, not the computer. This level of responsiveness is essential to support the feeling of direct manipulation (direct manipulation is one of the key GUI techniques to increase user engagement and control – for more about it, see our principles of interface design seminar).
• One second keeps the user’s flow of thought seamless. Users can sense a delay, and thus know the computer is generating the outcome, but they still feel in control of the overall experience and that they’re moving freely rather than waiting on the computer. This degree of responsiveness is needed for good navigation.
• Ten seconds keeps the user’s attention. From one to ten seconds, users definitely feel at the mercy of the computer and wish it was faster, but they can handle it. After ten seconds, they start thinking about other things, making it harder to get their brains back on track once the computer finally does respond.

A ten-second delay will often make users leave a site immediately. And even if they stay, it’s harder for them to understand what’s going on, making it less likely that they’ll succeed in any difficult tasks.

Even a few seconds’ delay is enough to create an unpleasant user experience.

Users are no longer in control, and they’re consciously annoyed by having to wait for the computer.

Thus, with repeated short delays, users will give up unless they’re extremely committed to completing the task. The result?

You can easily lose half your sales (to those less-committed customers) simply because your site is a few seconds too slow for each page.

How Web Widgets Affect Website Speed: An Example

Instead of big images, today’s big response-time sinners are typically overly complex data processing on the server or overly fancy widgets on the page (or too many fancy widgets).

Here’s an example from a recent eyetracking study we conducted to generate new material for our seminar on fundamental guidelines for web usability.

The following gaze plots show two different users’ behavior on the same page, which contained a slideshow widget in the top yellow box that required eight seconds to download:

Gaze plots from two different users: The blue dots indicate where users looked (one fixation per dot).

The test participant in the top gaze plot fixated a few times within the big empty color block before the content downloaded, then spent the remaining time looking at the rest of the page. This user never looked at the big promotional space after it had rendered.

The second user (bottom gaze plot) happened to be looking away from the screen during the eight seconds when the promotional content downloaded. Thus, the first time he looked at the page he saw it as intended, complete with the entire promo.

The slideshow occupies 23% of the page, not counting a footer that’s not shown here.

The user who had to endure the download delay spent only 1% of her total viewing time within this space.

In contrast, the user who in effect received instantaneous page rendering (because he didn’t look until it was done), spent 20% of his viewing time within the slideshow area.

Although eight seconds might not seem like a big delay, it’s enough to kill this big promo that the company’s web team probably spent weeks designing. If they had allocated the space to something that rendered in one second instead of eight, they would have achieved much better results.

Different Causes, Same Effect

Response times are a matter of user experience: How much time does it take before the computer is ready to serve the user?

The reasons behind delays don’t matter to users. All they know is that they’re getting poor service, which is annoying.

Big images in 1997. Slow servers or overly fancy widgets in 2010. Same effect.

Make it snappy, and you’ll have a big leg up on the competition and their slow sites.

Responsiveness, flow, and responsible widget design are all topics covered in the full day seminars at the annual Usability Week conference:

• Application Design One: Page-Level Building Blocks for Feature Design
• Application Usability Two: Dialogue and Workflow Design

Written by Jakob Nielsen and published as Website Response Times.

About Jakob Nielsen

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a user advocate and principal of the Nielsen Norman Group which he co-founded with Dr. Donald A. Norman (former VP of research at Apple Computer). Until 1998 Jakob was a Sun Microsystems distinguished engineer. Dr. Nielsen founded the “discount usability engineering” movement for fast and cheap improvements of user interfaces and has invented several usability methods, including heuristic evaluation.