Caffeine rollout and site speed

Matt Cutts, senior software engineer at Google, has revealed some useful information about the imminent rollout for Google Caffeine. According to the Matt, Caffeine will be rolled out to only one of the datacentres 'before the holidays' - this datacentre will be part of the normal rotation of datacentres. What this means is that when you do a search on google, in the very near future, one of those searches could be using the new caffeine algorithm to conduct search results.

Another thing Matt has been talking about is site speed. There is increasingly an opinion that the internet should be fast, and that the search engine rankings might incorporate this site speed measure as part of the algorithm. Already, site speed is used in adwords quality scores. Google has released a site speed tool  called page speed which can be used to measure how fast your web page is loaded. What this could mean though is a two tier internet where the people who can afford dedicated server or who are already in a high quality internet connection area benefit, whereas the poorer people who can only afford shared hosting, or the poorer countries with a worse internet infrastructure lose out. I think this is counterintuitive to the whole google ideology and I don't think they have really thought it through that well. Obviously, a fast loading site has benefits because no one wants to wait a minute for a web page to load, but equally, content heavy, interactive content is also valuable.

Surely though, having a fast loading website improves user experience and encourages people to revisit the site without the carrot of better google rankings, so is it necessary to penalise slow loading websites?

Where does this leave the issue of site loading speed? I think this is going to be a contentious issue in the near future, and one that will be revisited several times before a policy either way is reached. Hopefully, a happy medium will be reached whereby the loading time of a website is not